Reddit reviews Analytical Writing: For College Students and GRE/GMAT Test Takers

Your prose is excellent, but your arguments are weak. You offer many possible reasons that you hope to explain the decrease of business and the increase in litter and vandalism. But your reasons are not persuasive mainly because you are not developing any one of them in detail. When writing an analytical essay, you need to focus on a few points and develop them in full. You should not just throw in ideas without developing them, which will make your essay vague.

Another reason your essay is weak is that you do not provide plausible reasons for the decrease of business and the increase in litter and vandalism. You say that bad location and the lack of trash bins as possible reasons, but these reasons do not sound plausible given that the plaza has been there for some time and business was good in the past. Your fourth paragraph just repeats ideas in the second paragraph.

HOW TO IMPROVE

When responding to this type of causal arguments, you have to ask yourself whether the suggested event (the increase in skateboarders) is the genuine cause of the other event (the decrease in business). If the suggested event is a spurious cause, the conclusion (to increase business, we should prohibit skateboarding activity) is not warranted. That is, even if we eliminate skateboarding activity, business will not increase. To me, the most likely reason why this will happen is the popularity of internet shopping (real cause). People simply do not shop at brick and mortar places. Viewed in this way, the increase in skateboarders in the Plaza is not the cause, but actually the effect of the decreased business activity (causal reversal). If you want to know how to analyze GRE-type faulty arguments, this book should be useful: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B07MF455XK.