Annotating LR Prompts

Chanduell

Hello everyone,

For those that have had reasonably good results on their PT’s, I’d like to know how you go about annotating each question stem/prompt. No matter the stem in LR, do you always identify the premises, minor-conclusions and major conclusions with its supporting evidence?
I have problems identifying if some prompts contain only premises or context sentences, like type-2 MC question stems.
Maybe I don’t have the muscle memory to quickly figure out if something from 4 sentences ago supports a sentence I am currently reading. Any insight into this topic will definitely help me!

quinnory

I don't annotate anything at all, although I used to. I actually saw a significant score from -5/-6 to -2/-1 increase when I stopped, I found that it often actually distracted me from the content of the stimulus and made it more difficult to answer the question. The only time I ever highlight now is if I come across an extremely long stimulus and want to break it up into sections to make it more digestible!

I would (generally, maybe not with argument part questions) recommend avoiding trying to actively identify much else besides the conclusion as it takes away from the needed brainpower to actually answer the question, and most questions won't be asking those structural questions. During blind review, revisit and identify, when you have the most time!

My best advice is unfortunately practice. With time, it has felt pretty natural what is a premise, sub-conclusion, background, etc, even on the more complicated stimuli. There is definitely a pattern throughout the LSAT!

Edit: Realized my advice about practice isn't particularly helpful without an idea of how much haha. I have been studying since October kind of, but only seriously since late December. Stimulus structure started feeling more natural and automatic around April after studying ~20 hours per week.

jilliankirkland

For the last month or so I've been underlining the main conclusion in every stimulus, initially because I was bad at identifying conclusions, so I did that until I got it every single time. But I've also realized how much it helps me with assumptions, MBT, and strengthen/weaken questions so I'm still doing it. Those types of questions often have trick answers that are related to the premise or conclusion but don't really address the relationship between them in the appropriate way. So if you miss the conclusion in an argument there are many ways to get lost in the answers, and having the main conclusion underlined helps me to quickly look back at the premises and conclusion to find the gaps or whatever the question calls for.