Half right, half wrong: the LSAT answer you stopped reading

This trap opens with something exactly right and finishes with something wrong. It works on a feature of reading rather than of reasoning: the moment a sentence matches what you were looking for, you have effectively decided, and the rest of it gets skimmed.

Where the break usually is

Watch the joints — and, but, in order to, because, which, thereby. An answer describing a two-part structure is a natural home for this, since the first part can be reported faithfully and the second altered.

On Method of Reasoning it is the standard construction: "presents a counterexample, and then concludes that the original claim is false" — where the passage did present a counterexample and concluded something much more modest. On Reading Comprehension it shows up as an accurate description of paragraph one attached to a wrong claim about paragraph three.

The defense is finishing the sentence

Read every answer to the end before judging it, and when you find one that seems right, read it once more from the beginning — deliberately, as a whole. That second read is where the tail shows up, and skipping it is how a half-wrong answer survives.

When two answers look close, compare them CLAUSE BY CLAUSE rather than as wholes. Line up the first halves, then the second halves. The difference is nearly always in one segment, and it is usually a verb or a direction rather than a topic.

• Right technique, wrong target — the argument attacked the evidence, and the answer says it attacked the conclusion.
• Right first step, overstated second — proves where the passage suggested.
• Correct claim attached to the wrong part of the passage.
• Both halves true, relationship invented — two accurate statements joined by a "because" the passage never asserted.