RC Viewpoints, Author's Attitude & Tone Words
Recap: Whose View Is It, and How Strongly Do They Hold It?
Day 3 introduced the viewpoint inventory. Today adds a second layer: not just who believes what, but how the author feels about it — tone words are the signal.
1. Tone Words to Track
Words like "merely," "simply," "unfortunately," "impressively," "surprisingly," and "admittedly" carry the author's evaluative stance, separate from the factual content of the sentence they're in.
2. Attitude Is a Spectrum, Not Binary
Author's Attitude questions often have wrong answers that are directionally right but too strong ("outraged" when the text supports only "skeptical") — the same LR-TOO-STRONG trap, applied to RC.
3. Distinguishing Reporting a View From Holding It
An author can describe a viewpoint neutrally, in detail, without endorsing it. The tell is whether evaluative language attaches to the description, or whether it's purely descriptive ("Critics argue X" vs. "Critics rightly point out X").
Practice items on this page are curriculum-authored in LSAT style; they are not official LSAC questions. Real drilling happens on LawHub — see the assignment below.
Original Passage Excerpt: Open-Plan Offices
Workplace researchers have documented that open-plan office layouts, widely adopted for their promised collaboration benefits, are frequently associated with lower reported concentration and, in several studies, reduced face-to-face interaction rather than more — employees appear to compensate for lost privacy by retreating into digital communication instead. Proponents of the format have not been dissuaded; they contend that these findings reflect poor implementation — insufficient quiet zones, inadequate acoustic design — rather than a flaw inherent to the open layout itself, a distinction that, however plausible, has proven strikingly difficult to test rigorously.
Q1. The author's attitude toward proponents' explanation (poor implementation, not inherent flaw) is best described as:
LawHub free RC lessons on author's attitude and tone; one drill-tier passage set, untimed.
Back to LR: how to eliminate wrong answer choices systematically — contenders vs. losers, and reading all five before committing.