Authors attitude type questions.

nathanieljschwartz

I have a hard time identifying exactly what the author's attitude is. Can anyone shed a little light on this subject ?

K 440244

Look for words at the beginning of sentences, exclamatory words usually shed light on how the author feels about what they are talking about. For example, the author will use words such as "incredibly, clever, ingenious, fail to clarify"

When I am going through the test, I read the passage and make note of the subtle hints of contrasting indicators, reasoning structures and examples. I have found that through repetition and asking myself what subtle language was slipped into the passage I could determine the authors opinion.
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PREP TEST 78 RC SPOILER!!
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From PT 78 passage 2, the author mentions that the people he is mentioning "failed to clarify...social elites" (lines 08 - 10), the author is like you guys interpreted all of this art, but you guys forgot about this major piece. More author's attitude can be taken away from wording such as "For this kind of analysis to work, however,..." (line 24-30) the author begins to introduce a situation in where their ideal interpretation of the art would be able to work, but the author is also saying "however" because he doesn't agree with what that view is saying

I hope this helped a little bit...

Cant Get Right

That's a very big, general question. Sometimes it's more obvious than others. The authors sometimes really insert themselves with commentary words like "unfortunately," "hopefully," "regrettably," etc. When you see these, flag them because they are definitely attitude indicators. When the authors are trying to be more objective though, you'll frequently need to gather attitude from the content they include, how they discuss it, and what their conclusions about a given issue are.

nessa.k13.0

Hi @nathanieljschwartz
Author's attitude is or tone is how the author feels about a subject based on their treatment of the topic(s) at hand. Author's attitude helps us understand their opinion on a matter. We determine the author's attitude by noting their use behavior they adopt towards a subject and thus observe the tone. The specific use of language the author of the passage employs sheds light on attitude----tone. More often than not on the LSAT the author's tone (and opinion) are subtly laid out within a passage. Thankfully, you can pick up on this most easily by the nature of the modifiers (adjectives, adjective clauses, adverbs, adverb clauses, infinitive phrases, absolute phrases etc) used around statements. We can pick up on the author's attitude more easily when the passage is not as high in difficulty and nicely lays out the author's opinion on a matter towards the end of a passage. Annoyingly, picking up on author's attitude can be pretty difficult when the only hints of the author's feelings and/or opinions are a few modifiers scattered throughout the passage, imbedded between the exposition of complex and countering theories and ideas.

Meta example-- you could say that my attitude in the lines above ranges from 1. indifferent and objective discussion about the definition of attitude to 2. agreeable (about the idea of passages explicitly laying out author opinion in closing paragraphs) by my use of the adverbs "nicely," "thankfully," and the adverb clause "more easily when," and "not as high in difficulty;" and finally 3. not agreeable towards the idea of passages that feature both very little and subtle hints of author tone---and perhaps a bit frustrated from my use of "annoyingly" and "pretty difficult". I mostly stated my opinion explicitly about more difficult RC passages, but you can infer from #2 that it is of my opinion, as the author of this explanation, that I prefer passages with explicit paragraphs on author opinion (that underscores author tone) to the more difficult passages I characterized in #3. I hope this explation helps you understand author attitude---tone, how it is linked to author opinion, and how those things yield inferences in RC passages.