What's your diagramming strategy?

Harvey Specter-3

How specifically do you approach diagramming in order to minimize the writing necessary while maximizing clarity and organization? Especially when splitting game boards, I find that I end up wasting a lot of time just copying game boards over and over again when I've already made the inferences in my head. Any tips for cutting down on the time needed to diagram without sacrificing too much on clarity or organization?

BinghamtonDave

The is my personal strategy that works for me personally

I think you have identified the core issue here. I believe that we trying to find a path between not getting lost in the conditionals and not spending so much time writing them out that we have diminishing returns. On the first point: some people have said that ideally we should be able to do conditional logic in our minds. I personally have attempted that, but could never accomplish that goal, so for me personally, I write out everything that contains conditional logic on LR and even everything that contains causal reasoning. Even if it is a simple notation like: A--->B & C Writing out everything affords me the opportunity to not have to "hold" any of the relationships in my mind and risk making a mistake in doing so. I personally know that with a diagram to the side of the problem, I can be 98% certain that what I have written accurately reflects what was given.

So, like many things in life there are trade-offs, the trade-off to my high degree of certainty here is that I end up writing a fair amount which could impede on my time. So what I do to balance this trade off is get really quick and really efficient with conditional language. This for me meant tens of hours of the drills provided by 7Sage in the CC, drilling old problems 25-30 times and breaking down each answer choice.

So, the strategy is not perfect. Short of being able to perfectly "link" and "see" relationships in one's mind, no strategy here is going to be perfect. But I believe I have limited damage to my time at the same time as I increase my confidence in my understanding of the problem to such levels that I can say for me personally, this strategy works.

Others will have other opinions that work for them and I have spoken to people who have different strategies that work amazing for them so like I always say: get a range of opinions of here and pick and choose what might work and dispense what might not.

Best of luck!
David

Trusttheprocess

Listen to David's advice... trust me he's a gem!

Cant Get Right

Think of split game boards as just an additional way to represent a rule or inference. You shouldn't really be setting out to solve the game; sometimes it'll just kinda happen. When you're using sub game boards simply as a means of representing rules or inferences, then I think your question reduces to something much simpler: Does the information really need to be represented? If so, then represent it however is best. If not, then don't represent it. This gets rid of a lot of inefficient splitting that comes out of an active attempt to solve the game: You won't be trying to solve the game in the first place, so that's that.

A good rule of thumb: You should very rarely be producing more than four, maybe five, sub game boards if you've split effectively. There are a few exceptions to this--PT 36 Game 3 comes to mind--but on most games you've done something wrong if you end up with more than that. Exceptions, of course, are not terribly uncommon, but they must always happen for specific and explicable reasons.

Mario Robo

You should mainly be splitting when you can make other inferences. If you have a grouping game and can split because two things need to go together try to see if there are other inferences that gives incentive to split. Another tip that's helpful, sometimes just jump into the game, but if you see the questions are taking too long then don't be afraid to come back and split because that will end up saving more time in the long run.