Numerical answer
The five sentences below, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Arrange them in the correct order.
1. Before the printing press, a single scribal error could persist for generations, copied faithfully from manuscript to manuscript by copyists with no easy way to check it against a wider set of sources.
2. Printing did not eliminate error, but it changed its nature: a mistake in a print run could now be corrected in a later edition and, crucially, compared across many identical copies circulating simultaneously.
3. The spread of movable-type printing in fifteenth-century Europe is often credited with standardising texts that had previously existed in numerous, sometimes wildly divergent, handwritten versions.
4. This capacity for comparison across copies gave rise to a new scholarly practice: textual criticism, the systematic collation of variant editions to reconstruct an authoritative version.
5. Ironically, then, the technology that mass-produced texts also made possible a more rigorous, source-critical approach to reading them than scribal culture had allowed.
1. Before the printing press, a single scribal error could persist for generations, copied faithfully from manuscript to manuscript by copyists with no easy way to check it against a wider set of sources.
2. Printing did not eliminate error, but it changed its nature: a mistake in a print run could now be corrected in a later edition and, crucially, compared across many identical copies circulating simultaneously.
3. The spread of movable-type printing in fifteenth-century Europe is often credited with standardising texts that had previously existed in numerous, sometimes wildly divergent, handwritten versions.
4. This capacity for comparison across copies gave rise to a new scholarly practice: textual criticism, the systematic collation of variant editions to reconstruct an authoritative version.
5. Ironically, then, the technology that mass-produced texts also made possible a more rigorous, source-critical approach to reading them than scribal culture had allowed.
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Answer: 31245
Sentence 3 introduces the topic (printing standardising divergent manuscripts). Sentence 1 explains the prior scribal problem. Sentence 2 contrasts this with what printing changed. Sentence 4 extends that into the rise of textual criticism. Sentence 5 closes with the ironic conclusion tying it together. Order: 3-1-2-4-5.
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