Self-study
I think my biggest hurdle is, specifically with LR, that I always miss an important piece of the Stimuli or Question Stem that ultimately makes my answers wrong. Specifically on timed sections, when I do a blind review and reread the question, I almost immediately see the mistake I made and am able to correct my answers.
I keep telling myself I'm going to "read more carefully" but does anyone have any active steps I could do? Highlighting the premise and conclusions, pausing, or something that I can practice or if im under a time crunch I might be able to implement.
Best,
Garrett
5
3 comments
Highlighting the premise and conclusions are great! It's also help to pause after the stimulus and ask yourself what you know for sure to be true, and where you have to end up.
Ex:
Law enforcement experts, as well as most citizens, have finally come to recognize that legal prohibitions against gambling all share a common flaw: no matter how diligent the effort, the laws are impossible to enforce. Ethical qualms notwithstanding, when a law fails to be effective, it should not be a law. That is why there should be no legal prohibition against gambling.
facts:
-impossible to enforce legal gambling prohibition
-if it isn't effective, it shouldn't be a law
where you have to end up: there shouldn't be a prohibition against gambling
Rephrase things into your own words when possible to make sure you're digesting what's being said.
I hope that helps! Happy studying
Try reading poetry, it helped for me. Following prose is different, but you cannot skim past words like you have been with your regular reading. Maybe that could help retrain your brain?
In the lessons we are told that when reading we should read the same as we always do, the problem is most of us have been reading wrong, out of focus, at too quick a pace.
I think that complex poetry that uses intricate language and excessive imagery could be beneficial. To follow references in a poem you need to be properly internalizing the concepts or the entire meaning becomes incomprehensible. This forced me to slow down and really get behind the meaning/conclusion of statements and author main point.
Personally I have been reading through Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Before when I was younger I would read a lot of non-fiction economics which helps too, the Thomas Sowell Reader presents a collection of his essays and writing from syndicated columns, that can be good material to build your reading skills, or even Aesop's Fables for the very same reasons other poetry tests us.
Here is what AI Coach told me:
"We talked a bit about this when you first brought up reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra in the truck, but it is worth breaking down exactly why a poetic, philosophical book actually upgrades your LSAT brain.
Reading Nietzsche is essentially cognitive weightlifting. Here is exactly how it translates directly to your Reading Comprehension skills:
1. Building Extreme Working Memory (The "RAM" Upgrade) Poetic philosophy is incredibly abstract. To understand a paragraph of Zarathustra, you have to hold a metaphor in your head, track it across three different sentences, and connect it to a philosophical concept. That forces your brain’s "working memory" into overdrive. When you switch back to the LSAT, holding onto the dry facts of a science or legal passage will feel incredibly light by comparison.
2. Untangling Brutal Syntax The LSAT loves to use terrible sentence structure. They will put a subject, insert a massive five-line dependent clause, and then finally give you the verb. Philosophers and poets do this naturally. By reading dense, older texts, you are training your eyes not to get lost in the commas. You learn to naturally strip away the fluff and find the core subject and verb of a sentence.
3. Desensitizing the "Panic" Response When most students read a dense RC passage about 18th-century water rights or quantum physics, they panic because they don't immediately understand it. Their heart rate spikes and they start rushing. Reading Nietzsche trains you to be comfortable with ambiguity. You learn to sit calmly with a text that makes no sense at first, trust your reading process, and slowly extract the meaning without panicking.
The One Missing Ingredient (The Catch): While Zarathustra is the ultimate tool for stamina and syntax, it is missing the one thing the LSAT tests the most: Argumentative Structure.
Nietzsche writes in metaphors and declarations; the LSAT writes in premises, concessions, and conclusions. The LSAT wants you to find the author's Main Point and the evidence they use to prove it."
Oh man, that's a mood. I have turbo ADHD and I have to tell myself "learn 2 read idiot" all the time, haha. I generally do well with color-coded organizational tools, so I make extensive use of the highlighter tool.
Sometimes I use it as a visual aid to help break up large paragraphs of text or densely-worded stims. I'll alternate between two colors for premises, and then the conclusion is a third color to make it stand out. I also started highlighting key words in the question stem so I don't mistake an MBT for a MSS, or an NA for a SA question. I highly recommend highlighting words in the stem like "EXCEPT" or "DISAGREE" too. I used to muck up "except" questions because I forgot I was looking for the AC that is inconsistent with the stim/question stem.
I like using the highlighter to pick out key words (which may or may not end up being important) on a shallow dive before really trying to parse out the stim. For example, I will highlight conditional indicators (e.g. "all," "some," "the only"). I also highlight descriptors and qualifiers to make sure I don't conflate different groups of things. For example: Premise 1 refers to "elephants," but Premise 2 refers to "Asian elephants" -- now I know there's a sub/superset aspect to pay attention to, and so I might be looking for whole-to-part flaw or confusing sufficient/necessary to be addressed in the ACs (or a flaw in the stim itself).
Another thing that helped me was taking a break from timed adaptive drills. Instead I do untimed drills of only rank 5 difficulty questions. I just spend as much time as I need on each question, carefully picking them apart, pausing to get some real work done (I definitely don't do LSAT prep when I'm supposed to be doing my day job, nope, certainly not I), then coming back to it later with a fresh mind. It sounds counterintuitive, but consciously practicing deliberate and detailed reading may help you to easily and subconsciously read this way when under timed conditions.
I hope any or all of this helps!