Too strong: how one word makes an LSAT answer wrong

An extreme answer claims more than the passage supports. Usually one word does it — all, every, never, must, only, impossible — and the rest of the sentence is perfectly reasonable, which is why these are missed by people reading for meaning rather than for strength.

Match the strength of the evidence

The rule is not "avoid strong words". It is that the answer's certainty cannot exceed the passage's. If the text says a study SUGGESTS a link, an answer saying the link is ESTABLISHED has left the passage behind. If the text says most members, an answer saying all members has invented the remainder.

So the habit is to read quantifiers and modals as load-bearing rather than as decoration. Some, most, all. May, often, always. Those words carry the entire difference between a supported claim and an unsupported one, and they are easy to skim past because they are short and ordinary.

When a strong answer is correct

This is the half students get wrong after learning the rule. Strong wording is fine when the passage is equally strong. A stimulus stating that no member of a group has a property fully supports an answer saying none of them do — that answer is absolute because the evidence was.

Sufficient Assumption questions actively reward strength: you need something big enough to close the gap entirely, so the credited answer is frequently the boldest on the page. A student trained to flinch at "all" will reject it. Strength is only a defect relative to the support.

The mirror image

There is an opposite failure worth knowing: an answer so hedged it does not do the job. On a Strengthen question, something that MIGHT slightly help is not the best support available. On Must Be True, an answer that could be true is not one that must be.

Both errors come from the same root — not reading strength as content. Checking the modal words in the passage and in the answer, and comparing them directly, catches both.