Argument structure practice

plutofireball21

Hi,

So I understand basic argument structures, but when it comes to complex arguments and intense language, I ended up missing the questions. When I look at it with no time pressure, I am able to strip arguments down to their basic structures, but under time, I do not do that. Are there any drills out there for this? Has anyone else run into this problem? Thanks in advance!

LSATcantwin

The way I got use to this was with every. single. problem. I would write out the conclusion, the premise and the support. I familiarized myself with conclusion indicators (so, therefore, in conclusion, thus....) and with practice it became much faster. The best way to drill it is to do it with real LSAT problems.

For instance here is a drill that helped me a TON with this and with NA questions;

I found and printed the NA questions in the CC then I would;

1.) Write out the conclusion of the argument.
2.) Write out the support of the argument.
3.) Take a guess at an assumption made.
4.) Negate every single AC.
5.) Write out how the correct negated AC destroys the argument. - (Related the correct AC back to the conclusion)

This practice helped me learn how to spot conclusions, how to spot the support, how the support was attempting to support the conclusion, how the negated AC on a NA question destroyed that support, and gave me a stronger sense of the way arguments flowed on the LSAT.

It's not perfect but it helped me a lot with finding the root argument in harder questions. And improved my NA question type.

Positive

Based on my experience, these kind of questions take some time to master.
Good news is, once you are familiar with the common wordings of Argument structrure questions, it will become one of the easiest type of questions to answer because you can clearly see the correct answer intuitively without even thinking just like some pure sequencing LG.

When you study, you should have a mindset that each incorrect ACs can become a correct AC for other potential questions.

TheMikey

By argument structure, do you mean argument part questions? Even if you don't, what you do for that Q type is what you do for all other argument based LR questions. What I did to get through this was just drill un-timed. Honestly, it sucks but if you just do stuff un-timed and just break down everything in the stimulus then eventually you will get faster at it.