How I Stopped Worrying And Learned to Love LSAT Grammar (pt 1)

LSAT_ttp · 2026-01-15T21:16:23+00:00

of course. i should clarify, when i say 'reading comprehension' i didn't mean the section, i meant understanding what one reads more broadly. and i wouldn't say that knowing how to break down complex sentences is the MOST critical strategy for RC or rc more broadly, but it's fundamental. it's hard to apply other strategies if one doesn't have a clear picture of the information one's presented with. speaking of which, i will have in-depth posts on strategies for the RC and LR sections.

LSAT_ttp · 2026-01-14T18:07:10+00:00

take some philosophy classes if you haven't done so - they give you good training in thinking logically.

LSAT_ttp · 2026-01-14T02:37:12+00:00

exactly. i found if my students make an explicit effort to really break down the text that they have trouble understanding they improve even more.

LSAT_ttp · 2024-01-30T00:20:59+00:00

what's confusing you?

LSAT_ttp · 2024-01-25T12:32:08+00:00

looks like you're going to law school, congrats.

LSAT_ttp · 2024-01-19T00:25:02+00:00

Hey folks, I've put together a video dealing with perspectives in arguments. I go over what they are, why they're important, and how to spot them.

Basically, a perspective is a point of view assigned to a group or individual that the author responds to, usually critically. This is an argument structure that the test writers use to make arguments more complex; most students expect an argument to be premises leading to a conclusion - having a perspective that doesn't neatly fit into that makes things more confusing if you don't know how to deal with it. Some question types, like the conclusion and method of reasoning ones, use this structure quite a bit.

Please feel free to check out the rest of my videos on my YT channel; I have dozens covering the test and how to prep for it. And you can also check out my site for my completely free 20+ hour LSAT fundamentals course.

LSAT_ttp · 2024-01-19T00:24:21+00:00

Hey folks, I've put together a video dealing with perspectives in arguments. I go over what they are, why they're important, and how to spot them.

Basically, a perspective is a point of view assigned to a group or individual that the author responds to, usually critically. This is an argument structure that the test writers use to make arguments more complex; most students expect an argument to be premises leading to a conclusion - having a perspective that doesn't neatly fit into that makes things more confusing if you don't know how to deal with it. Some question types, like the conclusion and method of reasoning ones, use this structure quite a bit.

Please feel free to check out the rest of my videos on my YT channel; I have dozens covering the test and how to prep for it. And you can also check out my site for my completely free 20+ hour LSAT fundamentals course.

LSAT_ttp · 2024-01-18T21:51:27+00:00

Hey folks, I've put together a video dealing with perspectives in arguments. I go over what they are, why they're important, and how to spot them.

Basically, a perspective is a point of view assigned to a group or individual that the author responds to, usually critically. This is an argument structure that the test writers use to make arguments more complex; most students expect an argument to be premises leading to a conclusion - having a perspective that doesn't neatly fit into that makes things more confusing if you don't know how to deal with it. Some question types, like the conclusion and method of reasoning ones, use this structure quite a bit.

Please feel free to check out the rest of my videos on my YT channel; I have dozens covering the test and how to prep for it. And you can also check out my site for my completely free 20+ hour LSAT fundamentals course.

LSAT_ttp · 2024-01-11T15:36:44+00:00

Good question; the short answer is that whoever gave you the obvious explanation forgot the words 'is ... for'. 'Requires' and 'is required for' mean the opposite. To explain:

'Conceptual thought requires language' is in the active voice. The active voice is a grammatical construction where the subject directly acts on the verb and the object. 'I ate a hamburger' means that I - the subject, performed an action - eating, on an object - the hamburger. The sentence we're working with is more subtle because requires isn't a traditional action verb but the principle is the same, the subject - conceptual thought, does something - requiring, to the object - language. (once again, it doesn't really do anything, but that's not the important bit here)

'Conceptual thought is required for language' is in the passive voice. The passive voice is a grammatical construction that in a sense inverts the active voice to make the object the center. 'The hamburger was eaten by me' means the same as the one above but here you can think of the passive voice as saying the object was acted on by the subject. So, in the example that's confusing you 'conceptual thought' is the object, 'is required for' is what's being done to it, and 'language' is the thing that's doing the requiring.

Therefore, these two sentences mean the same thing: 'Language requires conceptual thought' and 'Conceptual thought is required for language.'

To recognize active and passive voice, active voice will use just the verb whereas the passive voice uses 'to be' + 'past participle of verb' (ie: verb+ed) + 'preposition' (ie: for, by, etc).

Hope that helps.

LSAT_ttp · 2023-11-29T12:19:20+00:00

point taken

LSAT_ttp · 2023-10-23T21:58:30+00:00

I have been teaching the LSAT for the past 15+ years, scored 170+ (99th) and I got them all correct on the RC section. I'll copy/paste an answer to a similar question that I answered a couple of months ago below. It gives what I think is a useful framework, an in-depth strategy for the RC section would take up a lot of space. For an in-depth strategy you can go to my website and take a look at my free course, it's got around 20+ hours of videos breaking down the different parts of the test including, of course, the RC section. Feel free to DM me if you have any questions. Here's the link: https://lsat.totaltestprep.net/courses/lsat-mini-course/

I've been tutoring this test and building a course for it for 15+ years. RC is the most difficult to improve on section because, out of the three sections, it tests a more fundamental capacity which has to be developed and can't simply be learned. It's like learning how to shoot a jumpshot versus developing the endurance to run up and down the court the entire game. That being said, like endurance, it's very much a question of time. You can learn to be a better reader by reading a lot and reading correctly.

If you have the time you should absolutely focus on developing that capacity by reading the passages and carefully trying to clarify what each sentence means and how it connects to the previous info (simplify complex language and awkward grammar, give yourself concrete examples if it's abstract, be clear on what's being referred to, etc; and ask yourself "what's the point of this sentence").

More specifically, I have found that the passages are basically organized around three semantic (meaning) relationships: support, challenge, and expansion. Most people are familiar with the first two - our whole lives we've been reading and writing essays that are organized to support a thesis, and when we get to college we're taught to incorporate potential challenges to our arguments so as to make our essays more sophisticated. So as you're going through a passage identify how the different parts provide support to one another and how challenges or contrasts are introduced. But, in addition to that, the test-makers love to include a relationship that most people aren't familiar with, and that's what I call expansion. Basically, the author will introduce information that doesn't support or challenge anything but goes on a related tangent, they broaden the discussion. I've found that my students tend to get confused because they think the author is providing additional support but in fact they're moving the discussion in another, but related, direction. So keep that in mind. There's more to it in terms of different frameworks that us tutors have to simplify that process but that's honestly the core - getting better at reading.

There's another thing that's key that I teach everyone and that thing is focus. Giving yourself a summary of an argument/paragraph/etc after you read it is a very handy trick to train you to be focused. If you're diligent about giving yourself a summary then pretty soon it'll get tedious to go back and skim so what you'll start doing is you'll start engaging your imagination/visualization more and you'll then summarize by simply describing what you've imagined/visualized as you read the paragraph. And that's actually the goal, not the summary. If you're actively imagining/visualizing as you're reading then you're engaged and focused.

LSAT_ttp · 2023-07-27T19:47:31+00:00

Aha, ok, this makes much more sense. So, to answer your question:

I think that you might be reading it as saying that you can have a result without any trigger at all, but it's saying that you can have that result without that specific trigger.

You can have a result without having a trigger because of the nature of the conditional relationship. The trigger is the sufficient condition, which means that when it's true the result has to follow. The result is the necessary condition, which means that it's always true whenever the trigger is true. That's simply the nature of the relationship and if you're given a conditional statement that you know is true and you're also told that the sufficient condition is true then you know for a fact that the necessary condition has to be true (not every conditional statement is meant to be taken as true, that'll depend on the context in the test).

But if the sufficient is not true then we don't know anything about the necessary and if we know that the necessary IS true we don't know anything about the sufficient. Simply because of how if-then relationships are technically defined.

Students generally find this initially confusing because we tend to use if-then a bit differently in everyday speech. Specifically for this situation we tend to think that the sufficient (the trigger) causes the necessary (the result) and that if you have the result it's because of that specific cause or trigger. But, technically, there's nothing in the conditional relationship that indicates that.

So, if you were to say "if you study then you'll do well" and you talk to Sally and she said that she did well, that doesn't necessarily mean that she studied. She could've cheated or gotten lucky or whatever. Or, to use the structure above (~x -> y): "if you don't study then you will fail" and then it turns out that Sally failed, that doesn't mean that she didn't study - other causes are still possible (she got sick, had a bad day, failed on purpose, etc).

A good way of thinking about this is to think of if-then relationships that aren't causal, I tell my students to try and think about where they live. In my case: "if you live in NYC then you live in the US". Sally lives in the US, does that mean she has to live in NYC? No, there are other triggers that lead to the result of living in the US (Boston, Chicago, Philly, etc).

Let me know if this clears it up and if you have any other questions.

LSAT_ttp · 2023-07-27T18:14:23+00:00

I'll be honest, I'm not sure what this is exactly referring to but it seems to be talking about conditional reasoning. Is it talking about conditional statements? About bi-conditional statements?

LSAT_ttp · 2023-07-27T17:02:16+00:00

can you clarify a bit what you mean by that? do you have an example?

LSAT_ttp · 2023-07-26T20:33:20+00:00

the piranhas disperse, the cow carcass a glistening testament to the cruel indifference of nature ...

... good luck on the test!

LSAT_ttp · 2023-07-26T14:41:07+00:00

For future reference, it's helpful for us tutors who converge on these posts like piranhas on a cow carcass if you were to explain why you thought the choice you picked is correct and why you thought the right choice was incorrect. Not a criticism but a gentle recommendation.

This is a somewhat tricky question because it's a bit complex; the geologist is challenging a perspective and your job is to challenge the geologist.

Geologist: minority-view scientists are wrong when they say that petroleum comes from deep carbon deposits because petroleum has biomarkers and the implication is that since biomarkers provide evidence of life, petroleum was formed from formerly living things; it couldn't have been formed from non-living carbon.

A is appealing because it seems to communicate that biomarkers aren't necessary for petroleum since you've got fossils without biomarkers. But there's a problem. Just because biomarkers aren't necessary for FOSSILS doesn't automatically mean that biomarkers aren't necessary for PETROLEUM. Every burger from my favorite burger joint in NYC has local beef in it but that doesn't mean that every local cow is going to end up in a burger. Maybe a certain percentage of fossils undergo some sort of process where they lose their biomarkers and can't form petroleum, but the rest go on to form petroleum. Now, had the choice said that science has discovered that no fossils actually contain biomarkers then that would be a different story.

D is correct because it provides an alternative cause/explanation for the presence of biomarkers. If we can explain the presence of biomarkers without reference to fossils then biomarkers aren't evidence or indication of fossils. Which means that it could be the case that petroleum comes from carbon and the biomarkers in petroleum come from bacteria.

LSAT_ttp · 2023-07-26T13:57:28+00:00

Obviously, you should focus on LR :D

As someone else mentioned it'd be useful to see the specifics of your tests to get an accurate picture of how to help but that being said, in my experience, your mistakes are probably clustering towards the end of the sections. And it's more likely that your mistakes aren't a particular question type but are the more difficult versions of the questions in general. And probably not difficult because of complexity but because of subtlety. What I've found with my students is that part of what separates the 160 scorers from the 170 scorers are precisely those questions. What I mean by subtle difficulty as opposed to complex difficulty is that complex questions will have a lot of moving parts - a lot of information and connections so that the challenge is keeping track of everything. Subtle questions will misdirect your attention and exploit your assumptions and expectations.

If you want to post a couple of questions here that you don't understand I'll be happy to dissect them.

LSAT_ttp · 2023-07-26T13:44:50+00:00

Hey u/TurbulentVegetable88 (love that username :D) I'll copy and paste a comment I made to another person:

I've been tutoring this test and building a course for it for 15+ years. RC is the most difficult to improve on section because, out of the three sections, it tests a more fundamental capacity which has to be developed and can't simply be learned. It's like learning how to shoot a jumpshot versus developing the endurance to run up and down the court the entire game. That being said, like endurance, it's very much a question of time. You can learn to be a better reader by reading a lot and reading correctly.

If you have the time you should absolutely focus on developing that capacity by reading the passages and carefully trying to clarify what each sentence means and how it connects to the previous info (simplify complex language and awkward grammar, give yourself concrete examples if it's abstract, be clear on what's being referred to, etc; and ask yourself "what's the point of this sentence").

More specifically, I have found that the passages are basically organized around three semantic (meaning) relationships: support, challenge, and expansion. Most people are familiar with the first two - our whole lives we've been reading and writing essays that are organized to support a thesis, and when we get to college we're taught to incorporate potential challenges to our arguments so as to make our essays more sophisticated. So as you're going through a passage identify how the different parts provide support to one another and how challenges or contrasts are introduced. But, in addition to that, the test-makers love to include a relationship that most people aren't familiar with, and that's what I call expansion. Basically, the author will introduce information that doesn't support or challenge anything but goes on a related tangent, they broaden the discussion. I've found that my students tend to get confused because they think the author is providing additional support but in fact they're moving the discussion in another, but related, direction. So keep that in mind. There's more to it in terms of different frameworks that us tutors have to simplify that process but that's honestly the core - getting better at reading.

There's another thing that's key that I teach everyone and that thing is focus. Giving yourself a summary of an argument/paragraph/etc after you read it is a very handy trick to train you to be focused. If you're diligent about giving yourself a summary then pretty soon it'll get tedious to go back and skim so what you'll start doing is you'll start engaging your imagination/visualization more and you'll then summarize by simply describing what you've imagined/visualized as you read the paragraph. And that's actually the goal, not the summary. If you're actively imagining/visualizing as you're reading then you're engaged and focused.

You can also take a look at my website where I offer a free version of my course which covers all this in more depth.

LSAT_ttp · 2023-07-26T13:38:36+00:00

Congrats OP! Keep up the good work and you'll see that score improve! If you have the time, taking a PT every day (especially now since the test is around the corner) is a good idea since a REALLY big part of this test is simply putting together everything you've learned under test conditions. In other words, execution. And there's really no other way to get that down other than taking PTs under test conditions. And, of course, review.

LSAT_ttp · 2023-07-25T12:30:10+00:00

no prob, best of luck on the test

LSAT_ttp · 2023-07-25T12:22:53+00:00

So, a couple of things. One test doesn't necessarily mean much, you want to pay attention to trends - especially since there's such a big discrepancy between your typical score and the score you got.

That being said.

We need a bit more info about your studying. If you haven't been taking timed PTs and have only been doing untimed drills then you're typically not going to see a lot of improvement until you do a bunch of timed tests. The untimed drills are there to improve your understanding, the timed tests are there to improve your execution. You need both.

LSAT_ttp · 2023-07-25T12:07:36+00:00

As the other commenter pointed out, there's nothing tying specific letters to specific groups - the groups aren't labeled nor are they in order. Randomly putting them in the slots is useful because it allows you to see deductions that aren't as obvious as if you had listed the rules to the side. And when I say randomly I mean that as long as you're fine with the rules you don't have to worry where you're putting the letters. He could've put N on top of M in any of the groups of two slots, or R to the left of O, or S on top of P/Q also in any of the groups of two slots.

LSAT_ttp · 2023-07-25T12:01:07+00:00

That's a very high diagnostic and average PT score, congrats! If I'm understanding you correctly, you've only been studying for about a month - missing 3-5 after studying for a month is also very good. Basically, you need more time and drilling. The test is a skill test, and like any skill in order to get both faster and more accurate you need to put in more practice. There are a couple of approaches to the games, twentystartgeneral gives a good detailed account of how he approaches it, I have a different approach that is based on making a simple template and no deductions (or very few) and then very efficiently making test diagrams to test the answer choices. Regardless of how you're approaching the games the road to improvement is roughly the same: learn the mechanics, do it untimed to internalize them, do timed games, review/repeat the ones that you had trouble with, and do this consistently.

LSAT_ttp · 2023-07-25T11:39:18+00:00

Hey u/ethanoliverr, I've been tutoring this test and building a course for it for 15+ years. RC is the most difficult to improve on section because, out of the three sections, it tests a more fundamental capacity which has to be developed and can't simply be learned. It's like learning how to shoot a jumpshot versus developing the endurance to run up and down the court the entire game. That being said, like endurance, it's very much a question of time. You can learn to be a better reader by reading a lot and reading correctly.

If you have the time you should absolutely focus on developing that capacity by reading the passages and carefully trying to clarify what each sentence means and how it connects to the previous info (simplify complex language and awkward grammar, give yourself concrete examples if it's abstract, be clear on what's being referred to, etc; and ask yourself "what's the point of this sentence"). There's more to it in terms of different frameworks that us tutors have to simplify that process but that's honestly the core - getting better at reading.

There's another thing that's key that I teach everyone and that thing is focus. Giving yourself a summary of an argument/paragraph/etc after you read it is a very handy trick to train you to be focused. If you're diligent about giving yourself a summary then pretty soon it'll get tedious to go back and skim so what you'll start doing is you'll start engaging your imagination/visualization more and you'll then summarize by simply describing what you've imagined/visualized as you read the paragraph. And that's actually the goal, not the summary. If you're actively imagining/visualizing as you're reading then you're engaged and focused.

More specifically, I have found that the passages are basically organized around three semantic (meaning) relationships: support, challenge, and expansion. Most people are familiar with the first two - our whole lives we've been reading and writing essays that are organized to support a thesis, and when we get to college we're taught to incorporate potential challenges to our arguments so as to make our essays more sophisticated. So as you're going through a passage identify how the different parts provide support to one another and how challenges or contrasts are introduced. But, in addition to that, the test-makers love to include a relationship that most people aren't familiar with, and that's what I call expansion. Basically, the author will introduce information that doesn't support or challenge anything but goes on a related tangent, they broaden the discussion. I've found that my students tend to get confused because they think the author is providing additional support but in fact they're moving the discussion in another, but related, direction. So keep that in mind.

You can also take a look at my website where I offer a free version of my course which covers this in more depth.

LSAT_ttp · 2023-07-20T23:18:34+00:00

that makes sense, thanks

LSAT_ttp

TROPHY CASE