To Lawgic or not to Lawgic

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• 3 Likes

  blah170blah Alum Inactive ⭐

  February 2015 3545 karma

  This is a great question and something that initially troubled me when I was studying. Most people will tell you, myself included, that you should only use lawgic when your argument requires you to know the lawgic very well. This is mostly true for:
  1) MBT questions
  2) Parallel questions
  3) Sufficient Assumption questions
  
  For MBT questions, you need to know what must be true, meaning you need to make only valid inferences. For a lot of people, this means drawing out the lawgic to be certain that you're not getting lost in the language.
  
  For parallel questions, you would use lawgic to figure out the structure of the argument so you can cross-reference your answer choices to the lawgical structure of the stimulus.
  
  For sufficient assumption questions, you would use lawgic to figure out any gaps in the argument. A very simple way to do this is:
  If the argument says A --B, and concludes that A --> C, then the gap that needs to be filled is B--> C. This makes it really easy to cross-reference your answer choices to fulfill the sufficient gap.
  
  For the remaining question types, you want to spend more time figuring out the conclusion and the support the argument gives to lead you to that conclusion. For some people, it helps them to diagram the argument if the indicators are given. For others, like myself, diagramming takes time away from the argument so I'd rather spend my time working through the argument and defining the argument core (main premise + conclusion). That's when it becomes variable.
• 1 Like

  jdawg113 Alum Inactive ⭐

  February 2015 2654 karma

  Great response, to piggy back, logic indicators are very common words and tell us what is going on, and there are probably wayyyyyy more questions you can diagram for than you should but it does take time to sparse out what represents what when the question may be asking something much more simple and not very dependent of the flow of logic used.
  This is a great example why you want to hit as many questions as possible while prepping so you become comfortable enough with the questions that you almost instantly know if you should use lawgic or not. Takes some time to get down but it's possible
• 1 Like

  MisterMagic Alum Member

  February 2015 89 karma

  Agreed; it seems many people get the idea from the video explanations that you're doing this on many of the LR questions just because you recognize a logical indicator term. You simply don't have time to do this on the test for more than a few questions (as mentioned by blah170, MBT/SA/Parallel stuff where you're identifying very specific gaps and/or parallels.) It's great in practice to figure out how the process works, how a gap exists or parallel, but to do really well on the LSAT you have to hone your intuition to see this in your mind, anticipate right answers, and find them quickly and move on without all the arrows. Be aware of contrapositives hidden in answer choices, and watch for tiny words like "not' or prefixes like "un-" and double-negative language that can give completely different meaning, or bury correctness, in extra language. But yeah, my guess is most people posses a decent intuition to begin with, and they shouldn't leave it on the shelf in favor of time consuming translations and arrows. Practice drawing, then practice NOT drawing, and do it only when you must.
• 1 Like

  harrismegan Member

  February 2015 2074 karma

  I had trouble with this too. I agree with what was said above in terms of which questions would be best to use it. But if you come up to a question and you find it intuitively easier to just go with it without logic, then do what comes natural to you. You can still get it right without using lawgic. You'll eventually learn to decipher which questions should use it and which ones you could rely on intuition.
• 1 Like

  emli1000 Alum Member Inactive ⭐

  February 2015 3462 karma

  I agree with the comments above. It's just particular types of questions that require lawgic. I learned that really late in my studying.
• 1 Like

  ddakjiking Inactive ⭐

  February 2015 2116 karma

  Yeah. You'll reach a level where you'll need to diagram lawgic maybe 1-3 times a test. For what it's worth, I took this past Feb test and I think I diagrammed maybe 1 LR question.
• Ben Schnell Alum Member

  February 2015 54 karma

  The logic games are lawgic, and I always use it there. You have to.
  Beyond that, once every test or so on an LR question there will be an assumption question that has a chain of 3-4 different relationships. I think you need to be safe and lawgic that.