LSAT Argumentative Writing
Back in the very first chapter, I told you to pretend LSAT Writing did not exist. You have now made it through every question type, every drill, and the whole practice plan. So it is time to stop pretending.
Good news first: this is the easiest thing you will do in your entire LSAT prep. No conditional logic. No reasoning gap. No five answer choices sitting there trying to trick you. It is just you and a text box.
What It Actually Is
You are given a Key Question, which is a debatable issue with no obvious right answer. Your task is to write an argumentative essay that answers it and defends your answer.
Along with the Key Question, you get a handful of perspectives. These are short takes on the issue from different stakeholders. They are there for two reasons: to give you something to react to so you are not staring at a blank screen trying to invent an opinion from nothing, and to model the kinds of arguments people actually make when they fight about this issue.
Here is the part people get wrong, so read it twice:
You must engage with at least one of the perspectives. You do not have to engage with all of them.
Nobody is counting. Pick the ones that give your argument somewhere to go and ignore the rest. Addressing two perspectives properly is worth far more than name dropping all of them and saying nothing about any.
Your position is yours. You can fully agree with one of the perspectives, agree with part of one and reject the rest, split the difference between two, or land somewhere none of them went. All of those are valid. What is not optional is the support. Every position you take needs actual reasoning behind it and specific, detailed examples holding it up.
And you are allowed to bring yourself into it. Your own knowledge, your own experiences, your own values, and your own critical evaluation of where the perspectives fall short are all fair game. That last one is usually where the best essays come from. You have just spent months learning how to find the reasoning gap in someone else's argument. The perspectives are arguments. You know what to do.
The 50 Minutes
| Phase | Time | What you are doing |
|---|---|---|
| Prewriting | 15 minutes | Guided questions plus a digital notepad to plan your argument |
| Writing | 35 minutes | Writing the essay |
Total: 50 minutes.
The prewriting portion is not busywork and it is not a warm up. It is a guided set of questions that walks you through the issue, and you get a notes space to dump your thinking into. Use the entire 15 minutes. Fifteen minutes of planning followed by 35 minutes of writing beats 5 minutes of planning followed by 45 minutes of discovering halfway through that your argument does not actually go anywhere.
How to Prepare
Here is my actual advice, and the first half of it is going to sound like non-advice.
Do not touch this before your official LSAT
Seriously. Not one practice essay. Every hour between now and test day belongs to LR and RC sections. Writing practice essays does nothing for your score, and your score is the thing law schools are looking at. If you catch yourself doing a practice essay two weeks out, what you are actually doing is procrastinating on the hard part.
Write your LSAT first. Then rest. Then come back to this.
Then do a real practice run on LawHub
Once you have written the test and recovered, go to LawHub and do one of their practice argumentative writing prompts.
Only use LawHub. This is not me being precious about it. LawHub is the exact interface you will be sitting in front of on the real thing, which makes it the only place where a practice run simulates anything at all. Writing an essay in Google Docs teaches you nothing about the interface, the timer, the prewriting screen, or how the notepad behaves.
Simulate it properly
No Grammarly. No spellcheck. No autocorrect. No browser extension quietly rewriting your sentences in the background.
You will not have any of that on the real thing, so leaving it on during practice gives you a false read on how your writing holds up under time pressure. If your practice essay came out clean because a tool cleaned it, you learned nothing about your own writing.
Timer on, everything else off.
How many should you do?
At least one. Non-negotiable. One practice run means that on the real day, nothing about the format surprises you. You already know what the screen looks like, how the prewriting questions are laid out, and what 35 minutes of writing actually feels like.
I recommend two. The first one to learn the interface and get the unfamiliarity out of your system. The second one the day before the real thing, purely to get warm.
After your first run you will have a decent sense of where you stand. If it felt fine, two is plenty. If it felt rough, do a third. You know yourself better than I do.
One rule, and I mean this one
Never do a practice essay and the real one on the same day.
Two reasons. The first is obvious: you want a fresh brain for the one that counts, not one that already burned 50 minutes of focus on something that does not.
The second is sneakier. If you write two argumentative essays in one day, the prompts bleed into each other. You may end up half arguing the practice prompt while writing the real one, reaching for an example you already used, or defending a position you formed about a completely different Key Question. Give yourself at least a day between them.
TL;DR
- Do not practice this before your official LSAT. That time belongs to LR and RC.
- After the test, once you have rested, do a practice argumentative writing prompt on LawHub and nowhere else.
- No Grammarly, no spellcheck, no helpers. Simulate the real thing exactly.
- Do at least one practice run. Two is better: one to learn the interface, one the day before the real thing.
- Never do a practice essay and the real one on the same day.
- On the day itself: use all 15 minutes of prewriting, engage with at least one perspective, take a clear position, and back it with detailed examples.
EZ!
That is it. Should be simple enough.
GLHF!