Logical Reasoning

PT118 · S1 · Q16 Literary critic: Often the heirs

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Literary critic: Often the heirs of a successful writer decide to publish the manuscripts and the letters the dead writer left behind, regardless of the merit of the work.

Conclusion (Hence)

A successful writer who decides not to publish a recently completed manuscript should destroy it immediately.

Evidence

Often the heirs of a successful writer will decide to publish any manuscripts they can find, even though many writers have manuscripts they would not like to be publicly associated with even after they die.

Evaluate

The problem the author identifies is that if you're a famous writer, then when you die, your family might be tempted by the "money grab" of selling off any of your unreleased material. But what if you hate this unreleased material and would be mad to know that your relatives let the world see this crap with your name attached to it?

The author then moves to a pretty drastic solution -- if you're a successful writer and you recently finished a manuscript that you decide not to publish, then you should destroy it immediately so that your greedy heirs can't posthumously embarrass you with it.

Isn't there a more moderate prescription that would work? Couldn't you label it with a Sharpie that says, ? Couldn't you modify your will to say, ?

Goal

Let's look for an answer that would make this sound like bad advice, a reason that a successful writer should not immediately destroy a manuscript they just finished but don't plan to publish.

16.

Which one of the following statements, if true, most calls into question the soundness of the literary critic's advice?

Some writers whose work becomes
No Impact
This answer just tells us that some authors don't become famous during their lives, but after their death their work becomes popular. This has nothing to do with whether or not a successful writer should destroy manuscripts that aren't going to be published (these writers aren't "successful" until after they're dead).
5% picked this
Writers who achieve a certain
No Impact: correspondence vs. manuscripts
This is talking about how a successful writer will probably have people who want to publish some of the personal letters they wrote, after they've died. If anything, this would strengthen the author's argument. It's establishing that there will be a desperate craving among the living for any other writing this now-dead writer left behind. That would be all the more reason to get rid of manuscripts you find embarrassing.
4% picked this
Correct
Most successful writers’ judgments of
Why this is right
This shows a reason why it would be bad to immediately destroy a manuscript you decide not to publish. You just spent the last two years writing a manuscript for a novel. You decide to sit down and read what you've written, start to finish. You're annoyed at how predictable your writing style is. You hate how often you use that one word/phrase. You're convinced that this work has nothing important to say and that people will make fun of you for having written it. The author thinks you should immediately throw the manuscript in the fire and delete all electronic copies of it, so that it's irrecoverable. This answer is saying, "Remember -- you always tend to hate your stuff when it's too fresh. Normally, when you walk away from something you wrote for a month or a year or so, you see it with fresh eyes and think, Hey, this is pretty good!" Artists are usually their own harshest critics, and so if they followed this policy of immediately destroying anything that didn't seem up to publishable standards, they would potentially trash works that were actually quite good (even by their standards). The answer is saying that when successful writers revisit something they've written later, they often revise their assessment of it upwards. The word "most" gives this answer a lot of impact!
Skill tested: Weaken · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.
74% picked this
Many posthumously published books would
Weak Impact
This slightly undermines the argument by saying that it's common (at least a handful of cases, 'many') for a writer to die and leave behind a manuscript that they would have published had they lived. This argument was never claiming that all unpublished manuscripts at the time of death are ones that authors would not have published. This answer might be dealing with cases in which a writer recently completes a manuscript, seems to like it, but dies before they have a chance to publish it. The conclusion is talking about cases in which a writer recently completes a manuscript, decides they don't like it enough to publish, and then dies.
13% picked this
Some heirs of successful writers
Too Weak: some
This tries to weaken by making it seem like a writer needn't worry about their heirs publishing manuscripts posthumously, since the heirs wouldn't consider themselves qualified to judge whether the manuscript is good enough as a literary work. But the quantifier "some" just means "at least one". It doesn't move the needle here to say that, "there's at least one heir who doesn't feel qualified to judge the literary merits". The author wasn't saying, "All heirs will publish anything that's leftover", just that "often heirs to decide to publish something that's leftover". In addition, it's not like the heir has to consider themselves qualified to judge that this leftover manuscript has enough literary merit to publish, in order for them to publish. The heir could simply be interested in making more money for the estate that they profit from. The heir could be thinking, "I don't care whether this manuscript is good or bad. I just care that Random House is going to give us $1 million for it!"
4% picked this

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