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Pre-Phrase
How do you pre-phrase correctly? I notice that when I get an answer wrong and I look at someone else pre-phrase that they was right on. I tried the pre-phrasing but mines are nothing close to what JY or others are coming up with. I can spot the conclusion and premise and I try mixing them together and still ending up missing the point with the pre-phrase
Comments
That is perfectly okay! You are learning! Don't worry about pre-phrasing; you don't need to know exactly what the answer is before you get there. In fact, I would advise against pre-phrasing because it is too rigorous and not flexible enough.
Anticipate the answer, generally. Doing so will keep you open to what may come as opposed to being so rigid. If you are rigid, you may not get exactly what they are looking for, freak out, and get the question wrong. For example, the answer could be in the contrapositive of your pre-phrase. But if you anticipate and keep your mindset high level and as general as possible.
Anticipation is something that should come second nature with the more questions you do. Read the stem, then the stimulus, then think about what was said and what a correct answer could say. A lot of times you can never know. Keep you mind open and you will be much better of than having a rigid pre-phrase.
Anticipating an answer choice (often called pre-phrasing) is where we look at what type of question we have: be it flaw or weakening or sufficient assumption etc and come up with a general form in which we expect the answer choice to take. We accomplish this by calling on our previous experiences. The idea behind anticipating (pre-phrasing) is that we know and are comfortable with the underlying reasoning contained in the problem to such a degree that we are able to solve the problem quickly and efficiently.
Sometimes this won't work. Sometimes the credited response is beyond what we can readily anticipate in such a short amount of time. Sometimes the credited response strengthens or weakens a line of reasoning in a seemingly odd way.
@JustDoIt nailed it above, we really want to have a general idea, but not too rigid.
I liked what you said because I find myself getting discouraged when I see that others can pre-phrase and I cant because I cant get a grasp of the concept
Never get discouraged! Sure you may not be as far along as others or as you like. But remember that your timeline may be different. It took me a real long time to improve and I spent a lot of that time envious of those who improved quickly. But that won't help you...ever
It kinda depends on the questions you are trying to pre-phrase. You should almost always be able to pre-phrase the Flaw and Necessary Assumption questions. For example, in Flaw questions read the stimulus and think to yourself if it falls under a sufficient-necessary flaw, correlation flaw, illegal reversal, illegal negation, sample size, or appeal to authority flaw. These patterns will become apparent once you start drilling by question types. Please also note that there are question types such as modern Weaken and Strengthen questions that have really unexpected answers that you won't necessarily be able to pre-phrase so don't worry if you can't pre-phrase every question.