Critical Reasoning

Oscar Publishing currently invites unsolicited manuscripts by authors of both academic textbooks and non-academic works of non-fiction. Since writers of academic textbooks usually adhere to prescribed curriculums, their manuscripts tend to be more structured than those produced by writers of non-academic works. Therefore, the CEO has recommended to the company's board of directors that the company stop publishing non-academic works in order to save time on the editing process.

Which of the following most helps to evaluate the validity of the CEO's recommendation?

A) Whether manuscripts for non-academic works of non-fiction are typically assigned to experienced editors.
B) Whether non-academic works are not required to be as structured as academic textbooks.
C) Whether checking that the manuscripts for academic textbooks have followed the guidelines prescribed in curriculums adds up a considerable amount of time to the editing of these scripts.
D) Whether some manuscripts for academic textbooks do not follow the standard curriculum prescribed in most universitie
E) Whether writers of academic textbooks are usually professors who base their books on the same syllabus that is prescribed in the universities where they teach

Looking for good explanations.

A) Whether manuscripts for non-academic works of non-fiction are typically assigned to experienced editors.

There seems to be reason to assume that experience would equate to efficiency and therefore an experienced professor would take less time than an inexperienced professor to edit the manuscripts.
Such a decision would be useful evaluating the recommendation.

Why is this option incorrect?

TheGraduate wrote:A) Whether manuscripts for non-academic works of non-fiction are typically assigned to experienced editors.

There seems to be reason to assume that experience would equate to efficiency and therefore an experienced professor would take less time than an inexperienced professor to edit the manuscripts.
Such a decision would be useful evaluating the recommendation.

Why is this option incorrect?

Hi.

Look at what you said.

"an experienced professor would take less time than an inexperienced professor to edit the manuscripts"

What is the question about?

"stop publishing non-academic works in order to save time on the editing process."

Assuming that all the experienced editors were editing only non-academic works, which, by the way, the prompt does not say. What if the company stopped publishing non-academic works and shifted all those experienced editors to editing academic works? What would the result be in terms of time spent editing?

In thinking that A helps, you made a couple of errors.

One error is thinking that "manuscripts for non-academic works of non-fiction are typically assigned to experienced editors" means that less experienced editors are assigned the academic works. You let yourself create a scenario not actually described by the prompt.

Another is not really considering that, if it is indeed the case that experienced editors edit faster than non experienced editors, the experienced editors would edit both academic and non-academic works faster. So the company would still save time by publishing only academic works, which the experienced editors would edit in less time than they take to edit non-academic works.

Your thinking about this question resembles your thinking about another question we have discussed, the Ozone, question. In answering both questions, you were tempted by answer choices that somehow sound right without actually having a tight logical basis for being right.

So you can increase your CR accuracy by learning from this, and maybe part of the lesson you can learn is to not allow yourself to take from an answer choice things that it does not actually say or support.

In the Ozone question, not equal does not mean less than.

In the Publishing question, experienced editors edit non-academic does not mean that inexperienced editors edit academic or that experienced editors do not edit academic.