Rank 6 by frequency | 148 questions in corpus (6.0% of all questions)
Author's Attitude questions ask you to identify the author's evaluative stance — their tone, opinion, level of approval or skepticism, or degree of certainty toward a topic, theory, or person the passage discusses. This is about how the author feels, not what they claim factually. The skill is tone detection: reading the evaluative adjectives, hedges, and emphasis that signal where the author stands.
Attitude questions zoom in on the author's evaluative stance: their tone toward a subject, the degree of approval or disapproval they express, the certainty or hedging in their voice. Unlike Inference (which asks what the author would conclude) or Main Point (which asks what the author argues), Attitude asks how the author feels — or more precisely, how the author evaluates the subject they're writing about.
The test is sensitivity to tone and evaluative language: telling the difference between neutral description and subtle signals of approval, skepticism, admiration, concern, or ambivalence. You also have to distinguish the author's own attitude from attitudes the author attributes to others — a passage can describe a hostile critic without endorsing that hostility.
And critically: you have to calibrate the degree of the attitude, not just the direction. Being mildly critical and being deeply hostile are both "negative," but they're very different answers. The LSAT rewards the reader who can hear the difference between qualified approval and enthusiastic endorsement.
Before you can identify an attitude, you need vocabulary for the range of attitudes the LSAT tests. Think of them on a spectrum from negative to positive, with various degrees and qualifications along the way.
Negative end. Dismissive (rejecting outright), critical (finding significant fault), skeptical (unconvinced, requiring more evidence), cautious (hesitant without outright rejection), ambivalent (pulled in two directions). The LSAT rarely presents authors as outright hostile, so dismissive correct answers are uncommon.
Center. Neutral (taking no evaluative stance), objective (descriptive rather than evaluative), detached (analyzing without endorsing or rejecting). True neutrality is rarer than it looks — most LSAT authors have a view.
Positive end. Measured approval (approving with caveats), qualified support (supporting the overall idea while noting limitations), approving (clearly in favor), admiring (expressing respect), enthusiastic (strongly positive, usually reserved for unambiguous cases). Like dismissive, enthusiastic is a relatively uncommon correct answer.
Mixed / qualified. The most common correct-answer region: cautiously optimistic, critical but respectful, interested but unconvinced, appreciative acknowledgment tempered by concern, largely approving but with reservations, guarded enthusiasm. Correct answers typically pair a direction with a qualifier rather than staking out a pure endorsement or rejection.
Attitude has six recognizable subtypes that vary in directness and specificity.
Variation A — Direct Attitude Question. 86 questions (58%). "Which one of the following most accurately characterizes the author's attitude toward [X]?" The dominant phrasing — names the subject and asks for an evaluative description. Answers are typically adjective phrases.
Variation B — Tone / Style Question. 2 questions (1%). "Given the style and tone of each passage, which one of the following is most likely to correctly describe the expected audience?" The rarest subtype. Asks about tone as a holistic property of the writing rather than attitude toward a specific subject.
Variation C — Author's Response / Reaction. 1 question (<1%). "The author suggests that [person]'s notion is problematic because it..." Framed as an intellectual response rather than an emotional attitude.
Variation D — "Author regards X as." 13 questions (9%). "The author would most likely regard [X] as..." or "Which one of the following most accurately characterizes the author's view regarding [X]?" "Regard" or "view" is slightly more intellectual than "attitude" but still asks about evaluative stance.
Variation E — "Best describes / characterizes the author's view." 17 questions (11%). "Which one of the following best characterizes the author's assessment of [X]?" Broader than the direct attitude question — may ask about the author's assessment of a complex topic rather than their emotional response to it.
Variation F — "Author would agree" as Attitude. 21 questions (14%). "Which one of the following aspects of [X] does the author appear to value most highly?" or "The author would be most likely to agree that [X] is..." Overlaps with Inference — classified as Attitude when the agreement concerns an evaluative claim ("X is valuable," "X is problematic") rather than a factual one.
Attitude questions reward deliberate evidence collection as you read the passage: noticing evaluative words on the fly so you don't have to reconstruct tone from scratch when the question appears.
Step 1 — Collect evaluative signals as you read. Watch for positive markers (importantly, significantly, admirably, rightly, convincingly), negative markers (unfortunately, problematically, questionably, implausibly, fails to), mixed markers (although, while, despite, notwithstanding), and certainty markers (strong: clearly, undoubtedly, certainly; weak: perhaps, arguably, it appears). Also watch attribution markers: according to critics flags somebody else's view; the evidence suggests flags the author's own.
Step 2 — Identify the direction. Is the author's overall stance positive, negative, neutral, or mixed? Don't settle for a single-word tag yet — just lock down the rough direction so you can eliminate choices that point the wrong way.
Step 3 — Calibrate the degree. On a scale from mild to strong, how intense is the attitude? One or two evaluative adjectives is usually qualified or measured; a cascade of strongly charged words can be enthusiastic or dismissive. The LSAT rarely tests extreme attitudes — if you're torn between moderate and extreme, moderate is usually right.
Step 4 — Match two-part descriptors to the passage's nuance. Correct answers frequently have the shape [direction + qualifier]: cautiously optimistic, critical but respectful. Check that both halves of the descriptor hold up in the passage. A choice whose direction is right but whose qualifier misrepresents the author is still wrong.
Attitude correct answers average just 10 words — the shortest of any RC type. That's because answers are typically adjective phrases rather than full claims: cautiously optimistic, critical but respectful, fundamentally skeptical, largely approving but with reservations, interested but unconvinced, appreciative acknowledgment tempered by concern.
The correct answer captures both direction (positive, negative, mixed) and degree (mild, moderate, strong) — and almost always uses qualified language. Two-part descriptors win far more often than pure adjectives. Single-word answers like hostile, supportive, indifferent are usually wrong because they're too blunt — the LSAT author almost always has a nuance.
The spectrum of common correct attitudes runs roughly: dismissive → skeptical → cautious → neutral → measured approval → qualified support → strong endorsement. Correct answers cluster heavily in the middle bands; extreme endpoints are uncommon.
Wrong answers on Attitude follow three highly predictable shapes.
Trap 1 — Too Extreme. The most common trap. If the author is cautiously skeptical, wrong answers say "deeply hostile" or "entirely dismissive." If the author is generally supportive, wrong answers say "unconditional enthusiasm." The direction is right; the intensity is wrong. Defense: scan for extreme adjectives (unqualified, complete, total, outright) and double-check that the passage actually warrants them.
Trap 2 — Wrong Direction. States the opposite attitude. If the author is mildly critical, a wrong answer says "approving." This catches test-takers who confuse the author's description of a view with the author's endorsement of it. Defense: track who's speaking when evaluative language appears — the author, or someone the author is describing?
Trap 3 — Neutral When the Author Has a View. The choice says the author is "objective" or "neutral" or "disinterested" when the author in fact has a clear stance. True neutrality is rare on the LSAT — if you see even modest evaluative language, neutrality is probably wrong. Defense: ask whether the author took a position anywhere in the passage. If yes, neutral is out.
Attitude's base difficulty is 3. It drops to 2 when the author's attitude is explicitly stated ("I believe this is a significant advance") or when strong evaluative language makes the stance obvious. It stays at 3 when the attitude has to be inferred from moderate evaluative language and the answer requires calibrating degree.
Difficulty rises to 4 when the passage contains multiple voices and you must isolate the author's attitude from the attitudes they describe, or when the author's own stance is mixed or ambivalent. It reaches 5 on comparative passages asking how two authors' tones differ, or when the correct answer requires very precise calibration — distinguishing "cautious skepticism" from "measured criticism," for instance. At that level, the question is less about reading comprehension and more about matching English shades of meaning.
Attitude splits 132 single-passage questions (89%) and 16 comparative-passage questions (11%). On comparative passages, the question may ask how the two authors' tones differ, or what attitude each author holds toward a shared subject. These require reading both authors' evaluative signals in parallel and noticing where they align and where they diverge — especially tricky when one author is approving and the other is more qualified about the same topic.
Attitude stems average about 19.8 words. They often name a specific subject the attitude is directed toward, which gives you an immediate cue about which part of the passage to reread for tone markers.