Argument structure: find the conclusion first, always

An argument is a conclusion plus the reasons offered for it. That is all. Nearly every Logical Reasoning question — flaw, strengthen, weaken, assumption, main point, method — is answered by knowing which sentence is the conclusion and what is supposed to support it.

Which makes conclusion identification the highest-leverage single skill in the section, and a surprisingly common source of misses at every level.

The test that settles it

Take two candidate sentences and ask: does A support B, or does B support A? The one being supported is the conclusion. If neither supports the other, neither is the conclusion of that pair.

Said differently — the conclusion is the claim the author would defend if you disagreed. Everything else is what they would say in its defense.

Why indicator words are not enough

Therefore, thus, so, hence and consequently do often mark a conclusion, and because, since, for and given that do often mark support. Learning them is worth the five minutes.

But the test knows you know them. Harder arguments simply omit them, or use one for an intermediate conclusion — a claim that is supported by something earlier and then itself supports the real conclusion. An intermediate conclusion has a "therefore" in front of it and is still not the main point.

When there are two "therefore" candidates, run the support test between them. The one that supports the other is intermediate; the one that gets supported is the conclusion.

Where the conclusion hides

• First sentence. Very common, and it defeats anyone assuming conclusions come last.
• Middle, with the evidence on both sides of it.
• After someone else's view. "Many people believe X. But in fact Y." The conclusion is Y; X is the position being argued against, and choosing X is the most common error on these.
• Buried in a longer sentence, where the main clause is the conclusion and a subordinate clause is the support.
• Nowhere — some stimuli are not arguments at all. A set of facts with no claim being defended has no conclusion, and questions about them are asking something else.

The gap is where the questions live

Once you have the conclusion and the support, the useful question is what the author needed to be true to get from one to the other, and did not say. That unstated step is the argument's assumption, and it is the answer to assumption questions, the target of weaken questions, the thing strengthen questions reinforce, and usually the flaw.

So the same two minutes of work — conclusion, support, gap — sets up most of the question types rather than one of them. It is why students who find Logical Reasoning clicking usually describe it as one realization rather than many.