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zackliu0830599
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zackliu0830599
Sunday, Aug 11 2019

I read through the "Loophole" and experimented with the methods. Ultimately depends on what works better for YOU.

The Loopholes approaches is read the stimulus, find logical gaps (CLIR) and have a good understanding of the "LOOPHOLE" before reading the actual question stem. 7sage method is reading the stem first to know what to look for.

Both methods still need you to ID the question type. For me personally, reading the stem first helps me to laser focus on the task in the beginning, since I have a tendency of over analyzing. Therefore I mainly go with the reading the stem first to attack the questions.

There are a bunch of practices&exercises I found to be valuable in the LOOPHOLE for LR book, especially during a blind review. I highly recommend doing the translation drills, reading the stimulus and then covering in up and rephrasing it in simple symbols and notations. First writing them out, then doing them vocally, and then doing them in your mind. The utility is very similar to the memory method that the CC advocates for the reading comprehension. Of course, during an actual test, you won't need to cover up the stimulus after reading it, but it helps training this way for a bit, to help you focus on extracting the right things when you read the stimulus, especially when the language is very convoluted and confusing.

The concept of "provable" and "powerful" didn't really stick with me, perhaps because I had already completed the CC and had practice with 7sage methods. Nor did the many specific

terminology derived by the creator, and I felt the same with the PowerScore bibles system. In all the prep books I looked in to, I tend to look past the uniqueness of the system and find out what are the fundamentals they relied on. In that sense, I also recommend picking up a copy of the Trainer, and look at the approach Mike Kim teaches for the LR section. IDing the Flaw, is sorta the same thing that the CLIR method aims at in the Loophole book.

In the end, the methods do converge: whatever approach you decide to use, your main goal is to sharpen your intuition, like JY says right in the beginning of the CC.

As for what to do first, I believe you should complete at least the LR portion of the CC, before looking into seriously the Loophole book.

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