#17 - Weaken

[Administrator]

Complete Question Explanation
(See the complete passage discussion here: lsat/viewtopic.php?t=14304)

The correct answer choice is (B)

This question asks us to weaken the assertion that Toni Morrison is the first African American writer
to use music as the structuring principle for an entire novel. The correct answer choice will show that
some other African American writers made a similar attempt at an earlier time.

Answer choice (A): Whether Toni Morrison intentionally simulated the style of jazz performance is
entirely irrelevant to the author’s assertion. The author never argued that Morrison’s narration of the
story is unintentional or accidental.

Answer choice (B): This is the correct answer choice. If a number of earlier African American
novelists sought to base the form of their work on the typical structure of blues music, this suggests
that Toni Morrison was not unique in her attempt to use music as a structuring principle for their
narration, weakening the author’s assertion that she was.

Answer choice (C): This answer choice can easily be eliminated, because Morrison did not simply
try to make her style reminiscent of jazz. In her novel, the narrative structure is a literary analogue to
art, not simply an attempt to imitate it.

Answer choice (D): Just because any novel can appear musical in nature has no bearing on the issue
of whether Morrison was the first African American writer to use music as a narrative device and a
structuring principle for the entire novel.

Answer choice (E): This answer choice would only be attractive if you tried to weaken the first
part of the author’s assertion—the observation that many African American writers have written
novels whose plots involve music. This is not the conclusion of the argument. Additionally, it is
still possible that many African American writers have written such novels, even if their number is
smaller than the number of non-African American writers who have done the same.

[15veries]

What makes C wrong?
is it because arts may not refer to music?
I was not sure about "blues" in B but since its about music, this kind of detail is not a big issue?

[Adam Tyson]

Hey there again 15, thanks for asking. I want to try to reframe your question - not because there's a problem with the question but because I think a change of focus in analyzing any LSAT answer choice can be helpful for everyone working on this unusual test.

Rather than asking "what's wrong" with a certain answer, focus instead on "what's better" or "what's worse" about a given answer choice. I harp on this idea a lot, in this forum and in my classes and with my tutoring students. The instructions never say a thing about picking the "right" answer, but instead they tell us always to pick the "best" answer. One answer might be perfectly good, but if another answer is better then we must pick that other answer. The good one may not be wrong, but it isn't the best choice and so it gets no credit.

B is the best answer here because we want to weaken the claim that, until Morrison did it with Jazz, "none had attempted to draw upon a musical genre as the structuring principle for an entire novel". That's the claim we were told to weaken - the nobody had ever tried it before. B directly contradicts that by telling us that, in fact, a group of writers had tried exactly that, using Blues rather than Jazz as their guiding structure, some time in the years before Morrison tried it.

C has a couple of problems that make it inferior, and you hit one of them. There is nothing specific about it - it's too vague. Okay, perhaps some folks had written about other arts and had mimicked their structures, but maybe that was only sculpture or painting or dance? There's another problem, though, and I think it makes C not just worse than B but downright wrong, and that is that it says nothing at all about those authors intending such mimicry. C says only that they appear to have intended that. It could be just that - appearance. C doesn't do anything to weaken the idea that Morrison was the first to intentionally mimic the art she was writing about. It says only that some works give that impression. That's not enough to hurt the argument.

One more minor point about C is that it tells us nothing about whether those other works were written before Morrison wrote Jazz. It could still be that she came first, and those others that appeared to have the same intention all came later.

For all these reasons, B is the better answer. I do think that C is "wrong", but that's less important than focusing on why C is "worse" and B is "best" (of the answers provided).

Let us know if that clears things up for you some!