Self-paced
Writer: In the diplomat's or lawyer's world, a misinterpreted statement can result in an international incident or an undeserved prison term. █████ █████ ███ ██████████ ████████ ██ ███████ ███ ███████ ███████ ████████ ██████ █████ ██ ██████ ██ ████████ ██████████████████ █████ ██ █████ █████ ███ ████ ██████ █████████████
Summary
The writer concludes that legal and diplomatic language has no literary merit. His reasoning is that, owing to its sensitive nature, such writing must be as immune to misinterpretation as possible.
Notable Assumptions
The writer’s support is that legal and diplomatic language must be unambiguous. But why does that mean it must lack literary merit? Perhaps some writing can be hard to misunderstand and still have literary merit.
Therefore, the writer must assume that there’s a connection between writing that has literary merit and writing that is misunderstood.
13.
The writer's argument requires assuming █████ ███ ██ ███ ██████████
a
Language that has ████████ █████ ██ ████ ██████ ██ ██ █████████████ ████ ████████ ███████ ████████ ██████
The negation is: language that has literary value is no more likely to be misunderstood than language without such value. If this were the case, the author’s argument would collapse: Diplomatic language could possess literary merit while also being hard to misunderstand.
b
Literary documents are █████████ ████ █████████ ████ █████ ██ ██████████ ██████████
The author’s conclusion is about literary merit, not overall importance, so this is irrelevant.
c
Lawyers and diplomats ███ ████ ████ ██████ ██ ██ █████████████ ████ ███ ██████████
We have no reason to assume that the writer thinks novelists, whom he never mentions, are more likely to be misunderstood than lawyers and diplomats. We don’t know what forms of writing the author thinks have literary merit.
d
The issues that ███ ██ ████████ ██ ███████ ███ █████████ ███ ██ ██████ ████████ ██ ███████
The author has no need to assume this: even if these issues were of great interest to others, his argument about unambiguous language and literary merit would still stand.
e
People express themselves ████ ██████████ ████ █████████ █████████ ██ ██ ██████
The writer doesn’t need to make such a broad assumption: his argument is about the language of lawyers and diplomats, specifically.