LSAT FUNDAMENTALS — GRAMMAR AND READING

Reading on the LSAT is hard for specific reasons, and understanding what those reasons are is the first step to doing something about them. LSAT passages cover unfamiliar topics in technical language, and that's difficult enough on its own. But the bigger obstacle for most students is the sentences themselves. They're long, dense, and written in a style that buries the meaning under layers of complexity.

So this post is about how that complexity gets built. There are three mechanisms writers use to layer information onto a sentence: modification, nominalization, and passive voice. Before getting to those, you need a clear picture of what a sentence actually is at its core: the subject-predicate structure that sits underneath all the layering. That structure is what you're always trying to recover when a sentence stops making sense.