Response for a memorandum from the business manager of Happy Pancake House restaurants

gre test preparation essay

Argument 15
The following memorandum is from the business manager of Happy Pancake House restaurants. "Recently, butter has been replaced by margarine in Happy Pancake House restaurants throughout the southwestern United States. This change, however, has had little impact on our customers. In fact, only about 2 percent of customers have complained, indicating that an average of 98 people out of 100 are happy with the change. Furthermore, many servers have reported that a number of customers who ask for butter do not complain when they are given margarine instead. Clearly, either these customers do not distinguish butter from margarine or they use the term 'butter' to refer to either butter or margarine."

Write a response in which you discuss one or more alternative explanations that could rival the proposed explanation and explain how your explanation(s) can plausibly account for the facts presented in the argument.[/b]

The manager of Happy Pancake House restaurants believes that the recent change of butter with margarine had a negligible impact on their customers. Because only 2% of customers complained and customers did not complain about the replacement of the butter to the server. In order to understand more about this situation, we need to explore more explanations.

Only 2% of customers have complained, the manager believed that 98% of customers were satisfied with the change. But is this true? There are other reasons can explain why only 2% of customers complained. Some customers don't complain to the server directly in order to avoid embarrassment. Actually, there are more than 2% of customers don't like the change.

According to the servers, a lot of clients who ask for butter do not complain when they are given margarine instead. The manager implied that the clients can not distinguish between butter or margarine. Perhaps, some clients just don't want to insist on asking for a real butter in public. Some clients feeling deceived may not shop at Happy Pancake House anymore. The manager should not only pay attention to whether clients will complain about margarine, but should pay attention to whether clients will return to Happy Pancake House.

There are other ways to get a better understanding of customer feedback. For example, instead of receiving complains passively, servers can use a questionnaire to know the thoughts of clients. Furthermore, in the Social Network Era, the manager can know the thoughts of clients through the comments on Facebook or google maps. These methods can more realistically reflect clients opinions.

To sum up, although there are a few complaints from the clients, determining the truth of clients opinions requires further investigation. It may make the Happy Pancake House more successful to take opinions above into consideration.

Hi Chen, your essay can possibly score a 5 with this type of writing. You clearly understood the assigned reading material and presented a logical and coherent discussion regarding it. However, you have problems with redundancy and sentence structure plus punctuation errors that held your essay back from getting a higher score.

In the first paragraph, you started a sentence with the word "Because" which is a connecting word. As you know, connecting words are used to connect 2 ideas within one sentence. That is the main reason why a connecting word cannot be used to start a sentence, there is no other idea to connect at the start of a sentence. Rather than starting that sentence with "because", you could have instead kicked it off with " That is because..." The word "because" in this instance, connects an upcoming reason to the previous sentence, which then creates a connected discussion for the paragraph presentation.

In the second paragraph, you used the same information again regarding the 2% of clients who complained. This is highly similar to the reason in the preceding paragraph, so this presentation is redundant. Try to always compress your discussion into one paragraph for related topics. That way you create a cohesive discussion that avoids information repetition.

Since this is an academic essay, try to avoid slang English terms such as "a lot" instead use the academic equivalent "a number of" or a similar descriptive phrase. Always keep an academic tone in an academic essay presentation.