#lnat

For those who are going to take LNAT, I have compiled a list of free LNAT Practice and Resources. All of these are completely free. Hopefully you’ll find these helpful!

https://www.thenotesloft.com/blog/free-lnat-resources/

(Content warning: the two essay questions I discuss in this post concern the highly controversial topics of Burkha-wearing and abortion, and in the latter case, whether abortion is permissible in cases of conception through rape)

So I’ve been teaching a lot of argumentative writing recently, and what I’ve found is that while students are generally good at coming up with the basic “two argumentative points + counterargument” body paragraph structure, the vast majority have no idea how to write a good introduction. Most, if asked how they’d write their intro, say something along the lines of “introduce the topic, give a summary of the points, and give my thesis statement.” If I’m lucky, I get “define key terms”, but there’s usually little understanding of WHY these definitions need to be there, let alone how to pick key terms to define and clarify that are actually helpful to the line of argumentation.

The thing is, an intro ISN'T a mere tl;dr summary of an essay, or it shouldn't be. The intro is the most important part of your essay because it should be where you lay out the definitions, clarifications, and principles that form the foundation of the argument. Done well, it helps improve the flow of the argument massively, because you build your logic off of it.

For instance, one of the most frequently-attempted questions on one of the LNAT practice tests is "Wearing a burkha in Western countries is just as offensive as wearing a bikini in Arab countries. Do you agree?".

Students inevitably jump straight into argumentative points on whether burkha-wearing is offensive simpliciter, which misses the point of the question. The question ASSUMES that wearing a bikini in Arab countries is offensive, and asks if wearing a burkha in Western countries is AS offensive. This needs to be noted in the intro. And then, in order for any sort of comparison to even make sense, a couple of things need to be established: 1) The benchmarks for measuring "offensiveness" 2) The grounds on which wearing bikinis in Arab countries is considered offensive

THEN you can get into whether burkha-wearing in Western countries is AS offensive, either by looking at whether the grounds for offensiveness in the bikini-wearing cases (e.g. goes against cultural/religious norms of Arab countries) apply in the the burkha-wearing cases, or seeing if there are any OTHER grounds for measuring offensiveness that apply in Western countries (goes against the countries' constitution? IDEK) that are arguably as important as the grounds given for measuring offensiveness in Arab countries.

You could of course question the assumption of wearing bikinis being offensive in Arab countries, and then say that burkha-wearing and bikini-wearing are equally INoffensive because neither meet these standards of offensiveness, but then that again requires a setup that mentions what exactly offensiveness IS. This set-up needs to come in your intro, or--if there are just too many clarifications necessary--in a separate paragraph right after the intro. Trying to jump straight into argumentative points without this set-up tends to result in a messy argument that's difficult to justify at best, or one that's completely off-point at worst.

This sort of set up is DOUBLY important with what I like to call the "policy-making" argumentatives, because a failure to first set up the principles or goals underlying the policy almost always leads to a policy that's incoherent or logically inconsistent.

For example, our second-most frequently-attempted question on the aforementioned paper is "In what circumstances should abortion be permitted and why?"

One of the common responses that I see from students is that abortion should be permissible only in cases of conception through rape or if there's a medical risk, and should be non-permissible in all other cases. If they'd done their set-up properly they'd have seen that this is logically questionable because:

The principle underlying "abortion should not be allowed in general" is the idea that "a fetus is a life and deliberate, premature termination would therefore be murder"

This principle is supposedly so important that it supersedes other concerns such as, say, a person's right to choose whether their body has to carry a child to term

If abortion is supposed to be murder, it is STILL murder even when the fetus is conceived via rape.

Which means that someone holding the view that abortion is undesirable because it's murder should actually either hold that abortion is impermissible EVEN in cases of rape, OR

Establish somehow that the fact that a person was non-consensually penetrated by a penis is enough to supersede the importance of taking a life, despite the earlier establishment that even individual autonomy over one's body is apparently not enough to override that. Good luck with arguing that one.

In fact, if you take "a fetus is a life" as the principle on which to base this policy on, the only logically permissible circumstance for abortion is one where carrying a child to term will kill both parent and child. At this point, it becomes a mathematical calculation: you either lose two lives, or you lose one. May as well cut your losses and just lose one.

(It's around about this point that many students start backpedalling on their views, but that's neither here nor there)

The point is, you cannot write a policy without first establishing and justifying the ends to which this policy is supposed to be tailored to achieve. And all of THAT needs to come within the first two paragraphs of the essay.

Your first step with any essay therefore, is not to come up with arguments and counter arguments, but rather to break down the question to get at the core of what it’s asking, and identify the concepts and principles that lie at the heart of the issue. If someone asks “is a knife good?”, your immediate question needs to be, TF do you even mean by ‘good’? Good for slicing sushi? Good for playing baseball? Good in a moral sense? And by what benchmarks is goodness measured in this context? Sharpness? Shininess? Your answers to these questions determines what your argumentative points are.