"Nonessential" premise indicators (?) Forum

[yepuhhuh]

A prep book says "after all" is a NONESSENTIAL premise indicator. Is this necessarily true? It seems like people sometimes use "after all" as a premise they feel is even MORE CENTRAL TO THE CONCLUSION than other premise stated. Of course, perhaps this is one of those "on the LSAT this always means X, even if ppl use it to mean X,Y,Z in real life" OR MAYBE NOT -- maybe "after all" and other "NONESSENTIAL" premise indicators change on LSAT?

Please help. Thanks TLS.

[Jeffort]

Your suspicion is correct, that book is wrong. 'after all' can function in numerous different ways depending on the context and how the idea it introduces relates to whatever else is presented in the argument, including introducing a major premise as you pointed out. Treating anything in an LR stimulus as nonessential right off the bat based on simple formulaic rules would be a big mistake that can cost you many points, especially on the higher difficulty questions.

Which book is it? There are a ton of crappy LSAT prep books out there at book stores and on amazon and only a small amount of quality comprehensive ones, yours sounds like it's one of the crappy bad ones.

[anon sequitur]

Like Jeffort said, this is nonsense, please out this book. One thing that students really want from prep books are clear rules that can be mechanically applied to get correct answers, so there is an incentive from prep book authors to "find" these patterns.

[yepuhhuh]

My bad (kinda). The book later clarifies. It's a good book, commonly used.