Feedback/grading of argument essay: Invoice Regulators, Inc

[ymsyb]

Hi,

Below is my first attempt at an argument essay. The prompt I try answering is:

Invoice Regulators, Inc (IRI) can make your company more profitable. IRI examines our client firms' outgoing invoices and vendor receipts to help clients recoup money owed to and refunds due. One client, a family firm with a 100-year history, discovered $75,000 worth of uncached checks in an employee's desk drawer, and others have also made large gains. 80% of our client firms have experienced an increase in sales during the quarter our services were acquired. Hire the IRI to improve your firm's profitability.

Write a response in which you discuss what questions would need to be answered in order to decide whether the recommendation and the argument on which it is based are reasonable. Be sure to explain how the answers to these questions would help evaluate the recommendation.

Invoice Regulators, Inc (IRI) claims to offer a service that enhances the profitability of participating companies. Although IRI has had apparent success with an established family firm as well as other companies, the claims described in the advert suffer from a number of fundemental logical flaws that severely undermine the credulity of the service, such as unjustified assumptions pertaining the the financial operation of companies, a small and unrepresentetive body of cases, and confusion between the efficacy of the service and mere sales phenomena.

The advert issued by IRI makes a case for the efficacy of their service by citing an ostensible success story with one of their clients, a century-old family-run business. The use of this case by the advert is unconvincing and inconclusive as the $75K fortune made by the business is more likely down to incompetent administration rather than IRI's services: there so happened to be a stash of cheques hidden in one of the emplpyees drawers. Even if one concedes that this is due to the efficacy of the IRI's service, there remains still the pertinent issue of having a very small and highly specific sample size, which nullifies the generalizations made to other companies.

As well as having a deficient sample from which to draw conclusions, the advert fails to quantify their success in any meaningful terms. For example, the advert holds ther their service has led to "large gains" for "other" clients. The lack of concrete quanitified figures introduces a vagueness that leaves one justifiably questioning the success of the company.

A lack of foresight also troubles the advert. IRI claim that subscribing to their services leads to profitability for the client. Apart from the merely short-term gains presented with regards to the family-run business, the advert defines no such period for this success and what is more, it qualifies their success over the financial quarter during which their services were employed.

Despite these glaring shortcomings, one must afford some leeway to IRI as clearly they are also a business with their own financial goals; it is in their interest to perhaps over-report success. However, the credibility of the advert would be bolstered if IRI present successful cases from a wider and more representative sample of clients, and with this they also include the actual financial gains over a longer period, such as several financial quarters. The incorporation of the latter also serves the purpose of distinguishing the short-term successes of the company from the claimed long-term benefits of IRI's service.

Thanks :)

[tommywallach]

Hey ymsyb,

Great writing once again here, but I'm afraid you make a number of errors, by which I mean that you don't seem to nail the actual problems with this prompt.

First off, once again you seem to be ignoring the special instructions. YOU MUST respond to these, preferably in each paragraph.

Your paragraph 1 doubts the given facts. NEVER do this. The fact is given, so we have to take it at face value. The much better point is the one you make later, that this is simply one success story. You should have written: 'We need an answer to the question of whether there are many other companies with comparable success stories.'

Your second paragraph discusses "vague terms." But if these vague terms are true, then this is still positive. And as I said, you shouldn't need to doubt the facts themselves to write the argument essay. Better would be to nail specifics. 80% of client firms have an increase in sales, but what about the other 20%? Also, how do we know that 80% didn't come because the economy was on the rise, not because of anything IRI did? (yet another question we need answered!)

Most importantly, you missed a major problem here. The conclusion here is that hiring IRI will improve profits. But the only proof they gave was improving revenues. Obviously IRI costs money. How much? You can raise sales all you want, but unless the sales you raise are more than the cost of the regulators, you will not increase profit.

So if you find that you're mostly hitting vague points when criticizing an argument essay, you're probably missing something. There should always be at least 2 really solid problems, and then maybe a third one that's on the weak side. Also, do not ignore those special instructions!

-t