Q15 - Many popular novels have stylistic elements

[ohthatpatrick]

Question Type:
Flaw

Stimulus Breakdown:
Conclusion: Using a journalistic style increases the chance a novel will be popular.

Evidence: Many popular novels have journalistic elements. Many authors of popular novels started out as journalists.

Answer Anticipation:
Given that a lot of popular novels are written by former journalists and have journalistic elements, should we believe that journalistic writing makes it more likely that a novel will be popular?

This feels like Correlation -> Causation.

Just because popular novels often coincide with authors and stylistic stuff that's related to journalism doesn't mean that the journalism stuff has any influence on the popularity. Also, the quantity term "many" isn't even impressive in the first place, as a correlation. I could say "Many people are hit by lightning in the USA every year", but it would seem dumb to then conclude, "So, Europeans, going to the US increases your chances of getting hit by lightning".

Correct Answer:
D

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) This describes the Conditional Logic Flaw. There was no conditional logic in the argument.

(B) Does the author assume that "if they wanted to, more than 50% of journalists could be novelists"? Nothing close to that.

(C) Does the author need to exactly specify what makes a novel qualify as popular? Is the lack of a definition of "popular" our reasoning problem with the argument? No. Even if he specified "Popular = selling at least 100,000 copies", we would still have the same reasoning criticisms.

(D) YES, ultimately. Could we weaken the argument by learning how many unsuccessful novels have been written in a journalistic style? Ugh, kinda? If we want to be technical, the raw number would tell us nothing. The idea of this correct answer is, "What if many popular novels have been written that WEREN'T in a journalistic style?" That would basically cancel out the evidence the author is introducing. If many popular novels have quality X and many popular novels don't have quality X, then you really have no basis for thinking X, or not-X, is a causal influence on popularity.

(E) There's nothing about "well written" anywhere in here, so we definitely can't accuse the author of thinking this.

Takeaway/Pattern: What a stinker of a correct answer. Best available ... Best available ..., such an important reminder to ourselves. The dumbest part of this correct answer is that "many popular are journalistic, many popular aren't" still doesn't resolve the issue. We would need to know what percentage of journalistic ones are popular vs. what percentage of un-journalistic ones are popular, to even assess whether we have a correlation between journalistic style and popularity.

#officialexplanation

[ElizabethP415]

This is informative.

[GolddiggerF208]

Can anyone elaborate the nuanced shifting from "unpopular" to "unsuccessful" in D? Simply I based on my common sense understand that a book can be unsuccessful but quite popular.