A system composed of a linear controller and plant can exhibit strange behaviour when the actuators linking the controller to the plant are subject to saturation, or other nonlinear effects. Linear conditioning means augmenting the system with a linear transfer function to change the system's behaviour during, and immediately following, saturation. In this paper, the behaviour of linear conditioning schemes is interpreted in terms of a single transfer function M(s). This transfer function not only facilitates the understanding and comparison of conditioning schemes, but also leads to a new framework for conditioning design.