Please provide feedback, first essay
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17 Mar 2017, 10:35
First off, thank you for taking the time to read this. I definitely need to practice my essay writing.
Prompt: "The following appeared in the editorial section of a local newspaper:"
"In the first four years that Montoya has served as mayor of the city of San Perdito, the population has decreased and
the unemployment rate has increased. Two businesses have closed for each new business that has opened. Under
Varro, who served as mayor for four years before Montoya, the unemployment rate decreased and the population
increased. Clearly, the residents of San Perdito would be best served if they voted Montoya out of office and
reelected Varro."
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The editorial is clearly unfairly biased in favor of former Mayor Varro, and it uses statistics during his term and that of Mayor Montoya to persuade the reader. However, the text fails to consider any outside influences and correlate the statistics with any causation of them, and therefore leads to an unsupported conclusion.
It’s stated that during Mayor Varro’s term which preceded Montoya’s, unemployment dropped and population increased. Unforunately, it the newspaper provides no evidence to support that this was directly caused by decisions and actions made by Varro. If Varro created more jobs, and he gave incentives to people moving from other counties to relocate to San Perdito, then the editorial would make sense. But no such attempts are made within the article. When describing Montoya’s years as mayors, the editorial again doesn’t support their statistics with any potential actions that may have caused them. We simply know that during the years of Montoya as mayor, the population decreased, unemployment went up and two businesses were closed for every business that opened. Without information as to what may have caused these statistics, we have no basis for judging these two candidates. Had the article told us that Montoya had local hospitals demolished to build a new interstate, this would explain the drop in population and increase in unemployment. Furthermore, if the editorial established that Montoya unfairly established laws favoring larger corporations, it would make sense that the number of businesses is going down.
Without any of this information, we as a reader are unable to properly conclude that Varro deserves reelection. More support for the statistics is needed to make this conclusion.