Difficulty Prephrasing

[mlhousto]

I took my first timed test about a week ago and I'm not proud of my score at all. I think I've narrowed down my problems, however, to two things. 1) Mis-reading and 2) Lack of preprahsing.

I know my mis-reading came down to time anxiety. The questions/answer choices I glanced at or skipped over in my need to speed read really did me in, which brings me to prephrasing.

My instructor's stressed, time and time again, that preprahsing is quite possibly the most crucial portion of the LSAT, without it, you don't know what you're looking for. I've tried to preprahse, but I can't. At least not without rereading the question first. I don't understand how to know what to look for/understand how to look for in a stimilus that could possibly be an answer choice. How do I look for an answer when I don't know the question? <-- That is my main issue with prephrasing. Essentially, I don't know what I don't know.

For example, question 3, section 4 of the December 04 LSAT. The question is about Nylon and Cotton being natural/organic materials. It turns out the question is a justify question. How do I know that I'm looking for a preprhase that will Justify a speakers reasoning, when I don't know that my answer choice needs to justify anything yet because I haven't read the question? (I really hope that I'm making sense, I feel like i'm not).

[Emily Haney-Caron]

Hi mlhousto,

Try not to get discouraged - it definitely takes time to start to see big improvements. You're approaching this in the right way by working to identify the cause of your lower-than-desired score.

For prephrasing, are you reading the question stem before you begin to prephrase? I wasn't sure from your post. PowerScore definitely does not encourage reading the question stem before you read the stimulus, but it can be appropriate to read the question stem after reading the stimulus but before you prephrase. For some test takers, especially ones who devote a lot of time to practice, it can become fairly easy to spot the type of question just from the stimulus, but that isn't true for everyone!

[mlhousto]

Here's the part where I hang my head in embarrassment because during my practice test I was not reading the question stem before trying to prephrase, which I only just realized. My mind sort of went on auto pilot and obviously skipped a vital step. That being said, however, I did find an excellent suggestion on the blog about prephrasing exercises. The post suggested using sticky notes to formulate an answer based on the S and the QS whilst covering the actual answer choices. I'm going to try that tonight!