Background (to be read): In 2023, I created and posted on this site a series of puzzles called A Trivial Pursuit. This involved creating 24 themed puzzles, each of which produced a one-word final answer, which - once all 24 answers were combined together in a particular way - would help to solve a final meta-puzzle.
There was one puzzle which I created for the series that I had to drop and entirely redesign at the eleventh hour, as a final double-check revealed a fatal flaw that had been present in its construction from the very beginning and which would entirely break the meta-puzzle. However, by itself it's still an interesting type of puzzle (I believe, anyway) worth posting, and sharing it here might serve as a reminder to all (me included!) of the importance of double-checking your puzzles before you hit 'Post'...
The puzzle now follows, below.
You hold in your hands 12 paper scraps from a shredded sheet of sequential instructions. It's clear that the section from the very top of the page reads:
Start with the string 'WRITERMARYANNEVANS'.
Delete all letters also present in her 11-letter pen name.
...and the one at the very end reads:
- Apply the instruction you see before you to the original string.
However, the main body of the instruction sheet has been sliced into a number of different sections - each featuring exactly two instructions - that seem pretty much impossible to reassemble into the correct order by eye alone... You're going to have to reconstruct the original instruction sheet by other means...
TASK: (i) Use the 10 jumbled sections below (along with those above) to reconstruct the original instruction sheet in full, (ii) Give the final one-word answer to this puzzle, and (iii) Explain how this was problematic for the original puzzle series! (You may find it useful to refer to the meta-puzzle itself...)
Delete the second occurrence of the only 2-letter sequence that appears twice in the string.
Replace the last vowel with the name of the fourth-largest moon in the Solar System.
Insert an 'R' to form the name of a Frankish count who conspired against Charlemagne.
Change one letter to form a 5-letter fruit; remove it from the string.
Insert an 'S' to form a 5-letter word meaning 'goodbye' in a European language; remove it from the string.
Insert a letter immediately before the last letter to form the name of the 16th letter of the Greek alphabet.
Insert the word 'ME' immediately to the right of the first instance of the letter 'I'.
Remove the first letter to contain a curved section and the last letter to comprise only straight lines.
Replace the name of a country with that of a neighbouring country
alsoknown to have nuclear weapons.*Insert the 2-letter code of the smallest US state (by area) between the two identical letters that neighbour each other.
Replace the surname of a UK PM with that of her immediate predecessor.
Replace the name of a Biblical figure in the book of Genesis with that of his father.
Reverse the entire string.
Replace the name of an American rock group with the surname of its lead singer.
Reverse the letters in the first half of the string, then move the result to the end of the line.
Remove each instance of the first chemical symbol in the Periodic Table.
Swap two adjacent letters to form a 6-letter synonym of 'modify'.
Replace a 4-letter 1995 single with the 9-letter name of the band who performed it.
Swap two adjacent letters to form the name of a performer with a hit song called 'Holiday'.
Replace the two central letters with a single 'O'.
* NB At initial posting the clue marked with an asterisk erroneously contained the word 'also'. This - ironically, given the question title and context! - was an unintended error that affected the interpretation of the instruction, and has now been rectified in an edit removing it. No harm has been done to any answers posted before the change, but my apologies for any inconvenience to solvers whose unposted attempted solutions were affected by this typo. The lesson at the heart of this question still stands - doubly so!
