Conditional Statements

harrismegan

Hello!
I really want to improve on my conditionality. Especially when it comes to looking at the stimulus and, although it's not worded in traditional "if...then" statements, be able to get a sense of what the conditionality is.

Does anyone have any suggestions for how to improve upon this? I've recently redone the course. I'm going through my old answer choices from this time around and making sure I understand why my answers were wrong, so I think this is really the time to increase my skills on this.

I know I can go through old questions and write out the conditional statements, but has anyone done anything additional they wouldn't mind sharing?

Thanks

(good luck to all you Feb LSAT takers getting your grades back soon!)

LSATisland

A stimulus might have a conditional statement, but it will have many other stuff too. If you want more fluency with conditional statements, just focus on the conditional statement alone. You can even write your own. Then play around with it. Change it to the contrapositive. Just reverse it or just negate it and identify why that is not correct.

You can then also use stimulus. This will help identify conditional statements within a broader context. For this skill, it will be good that the stimulus has other elements.

When done, you can focus on what type of conditional statements would be worth diagramming and which are not. Many statements have conditionality in them, but are not meant to be testing your conditional abilities. Usually you need the conditionality skill for the formal logic questions, when more than 1 conditional statement is tied together. However, the conditionality skill is still useful, especially in LG.

Maritzaa

LR Manhattan Prep... buy it. I just got it and everything is starting to 'click.' The lessons learned from the Intro to Logic section are starting to become obvious when I review with LR Manhattan Prep book.

I think 7sage gives you the tools and Manhattan Prep gives shows you the application.

Allison M

I find that immediately rephrasing everything into "If...then" format really helps. So if a question said: "Unless it's snowing, I'll ride my bike to work," I would rephrase as: "If it's not snowing, then I'll ride my bike to work." To me, rephrasing in my head before writing in lawgic is faster and easier than doing things the other way around.

That said, though, you'll want to be careful with this technique; it is certainly possible that what is intuitive for me is not for you (and vice versa!).

Good luck!

harrismegan

@Mitzyyyy Interesting. I struggle with LR. In terms of teaching, does the Manhattan go well with 7Sage? I wouldn't want to get a book that teaches it differently... in a bad way than 7Sage does. I want something complementary. Is it quite complementary??

blah170blah

I agree with @"Allison M" in that condensing the difficult conditional statements into "if then" statements or drawing the "if then" statements out like (A --> can be helpful. For me, I did that less often than taking the time to better understand what the argument states. While for Allison, the technique of rephrasing "unless" into "if not x, then y" was intuitive, it had the opposite effect on me. I wouldn't really think about what that "unless" was doing and try to write it down into traditional conditional logic form. By the time I did that, I still wasn't sure if my conditional logic was right and I had just wasted time.

Instead, I thought about what that "unless" signified. Really, when we say "unless" a, then b, we're really pointing out that a is necessary for b to happen. OH! I see. If a is the necessary condition, then the conditional statement is really just b--> a.

Allison M

@blah170blah : further proof that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to the LSAT!

emli1000

I approach every stimulus with an if/then as @"Allison M" mentioned

Maritzaa

@harrismegan I personally think the $35 is worth it. I wanted an additional guide to help close the "gap" in LR and Manhattan Prep does it well. I am not going into it looking for new ways to attack, just looking for explanations that jump off what JY has already taught. I haven't gone through the whole book but it doesn't look like they are teaching anything completely different than what we've learned here. They provide a lot of question types that have conditional statements and tell you when it is (and not) appropriate to diagram. And because they are grouped in families it's easier to distinguish when you should be looking for / expecting conditional statements and/or diagramming.

harrismegan

@Mitzyyyy sounds good. Thank you for the advice. I'll probably pick myself up a copy and see how good it goes. thanks again!!

emli1000

@harrismegan have you used the trainer?

harrismegan

I have used it, yes. I haven't looked at it for anything aside from reading comprehension and it really helped me solidify my understanding.
RC is my worst section, but it helped me see it in terms of structure and not in terms of information. Really, really, really helpful.
It also helps you break it down into what the question is specifically asking so you can hone your skills in.

Example. "What is the main purpose of this article" (I know that's not how it's exactly written lol)
It teaches you to realize that it's looking for a broad, reasoning structure.

Another example would be "It can be inferred from the passage that the author would think...."
It teaches you to realize that you're looking for a broad opinion.

"The passage indicates 3 ways that..."
It teaches you to realize that you're looking for a specific reasoning structure, where you have to go physically back into the passage and find that information.

For me, it helped that way!
I don't know if you were looking for me to explain it.... lol but I did anyways. ENJOY! @emli1000

emli1000

Thanks! I started reading over flaw question types and realized how helpful it actually is. Thanks for the info on RC. I haven't managed to read that section yet but now I'm actually looking forward to it!

Nilesh S

@emli1000 ... I hope the pencil markings didn't spoil it for you... sorry for not rubbing them out again flaws were practically the only thing I did there

emli1000

@"Nilesh S" That has been taken care of LOL there aren't any pencil markings on there anymore lol

Nilesh S

and I can guess that RC would be pretty good as I did the Manhattan RC guide... with was written by Mike Kim... as was the trainer... so broadly, I guess they would have the same structure.

emli1000

There's just so much info to learn from various sources! It's hard deciding which one I want to go with.

Nilesh S

@emli1000 haha great... and now you know what poor handwriting I have which was one of the reasons I wanted to erase it before sending... but I guess now the secret is out

emli1000

@"Nilesh S" hahahaha but I would have still seen it on the shipping label hahaha jk it's not that bad.

harrismegan

Oh. I did use it for flaw because I heard both the flaw section and RC were superior. It really really really really helped me with flaw!