Prephrasing: decide what the answer must do before you read the answers

Prephrasing is one sentence of work: after reading the argument and the question stem, and before reading any answer choice, say what the correct answer will have to do.

Not the wording — the job. "It has to rule out another explanation." "It has to be something this argument needs to be true." "It has to describe how the second speaker responded." One sentence, in your head, costing a few seconds.

Why it works

It changes the task from evaluating to matching, and matching is far faster and far more accurate.

Without a prephrase, you read five choices cold and ask of each one "could this be right?" Every choice gets the benefit of the doubt, several sound plausible, and you end up comparing two of them against each other rather than against the argument. That comparison is where most wrong answers get chosen.

With a prephrase, you have a standard before you have a temptation. A choice either does the job or it does not, and the ones that merely sound reasonable never get to compete.

It is armor against the traps

The LSAT's wrong answers are engineered to be attractive after you have read the argument — true statements that are irrelevant, relevant statements that are too strong, answers to a slightly different question. Every one of those is designed to look good to a reader with no fixed criterion.

A prephrase is a fixed criterion. "True but does not affect the conclusion" is obviously disqualified when you already decided the answer has to affect the conclusion. Undefended, that same choice is the second-most-popular answer on the question.

How to do it without slowing down

• Read the stem first. It tells you what job you are doing, so you read the argument with a purpose rather than reading it twice.
• Find the conclusion before anything else. Most prephrases are about the conclusion, and an argument whose conclusion you have not located cannot be prephrased at all.
• Say the job, not the sentence. You are not trying to predict the wording; you are trying to know what would satisfy you.
• Hold it loosely. If none of the five matches your prephrase, the prephrase was wrong or incomplete — go back to the argument rather than forcing a choice to fit.

That last point matters. A prephrase held too tightly becomes its own trap, where you reject the correct answer because it is phrased differently from what you imagined. The prephrase is a filter, not a template.

Where it applies least

On questions where the answer space is genuinely open — some Inference questions, where many things could validly follow — a specific prephrase is not possible. Even there a partial one helps: you can still decide that the answer must be fully supported by the text and nothing more, which disqualifies most of the choices immediately.