Do you know anybody who ever wrote in praising them on an article? I know I don't.
Good point! In 30 years I heard a number of people brag about their photograph, or a picture of someone they knew, being in a magazine or book, and if there was every a personal experience involving an article on a dub or someone close to them, I heard about that, too. But I have NEVER had anyone say "I (or someone I know) wrote that letter to the Society!" And they'd have said something, believe me.
The reason is because the Society writes their own Questions from Readers and takes other liberties with quoted material.
Once, working in News Service, we interviewed all the new baptizees and sent the most interesting "how I came into the truth" comments to the Society (at their request, according to the bro directing traffic in the department), and many months later there was an article in one of the magazines that apparently grew out of this collection of quotes. Of course, they got quotes from all over the country, if not the world, and they did not identify the source of the handful of stories they used. The odds of them using one of mine were prety slim. Still, I went over it carefully and saw one quote that I recognized (from the details) as one we had sent them, but it was extensively rewritten and some of the facts altered. Perhaps that was to protect an identity, although no names were included with the reports. It seemed odd to me that they would disguise an anonymous experience, but I suppose it was to enforce whatever point they wanted to make with the article. That's probably because they were not trained journalists or editors, but just guys who had some writing ability and whose only guidelines were philosophical.