8 min readโขLast Updated on July 11, 2024
Sonia Sohail
Jesse
Sonia Sohail
Jesse
Being the first section of the exam, it's best to start on the right path! At first glance, the ACT English section may seem slightly daunting, with only 45 minutes to complete 75 questions. However, the tips shared in this post will (hopefully) ease any of your worries that you may have about this section, so you can aim high and reach high ๐!ย
Here's what we'll cover today:
Here, we will discuss how this section of the exam is formatted ๐, how many questions you have to solve in the amount of time โฐ, and what types of questions you might encounter on the exam.
Now that we know what to expect in the section, you might be wondering: what exactly do I need to know about grammar and writing to do well? ๐ค
Here, we'll go over what grammar rules and writing skills you'll be asked to demonstrate on the exam! There are 3 main skills that you'll be tested on:
According to the ACT Study Guide, this category requires you to be able to write coherently with a purpose or focus in mind.
Within this category are two more skills that are needed to achieve success:
According to the ACT Study Guide, this category requires you to use precise language ๐ and word choices that are appropriate for the passage based on the context provided.ย
According to the ACT Study Guide, this category represents the majority of questions you will encounter in this section of the exam. It requires you to know various grammar rules, such as punctuations and conjunctions ๐ฃ, as well as identifying sentence structure.ย
This category is broken up into three main components:
In this section, we'll take a look at some questions you might encounter in the ACT English section! These questions are taken from the officialย ACT Study Guide 2023-2024. You may click the link to follow along.
This question is from the first passage in the study guide. It is an example of a word choice question, where you would have to use the context of the passage and the given sentence to determine the best word to use. Based on this sentence, we could plug in each word (like how you would do with numbers on the ACT Math Section!) and see if it matches the tone of the passage and conveys the intended meaning โ . Just by reading the sentence, you can see that the author is trying to convey that seven different arrangements of lines can be made. Knowing this, it is easy to determine which word would best fit the sentence. The words 'susceptible', 'responsible', and 'capable' all do not convey this intended meaning, leaving 'possible' as our final answer, which is C.ย
Now let's look at a different type of question:ย
This question relates to the topic development skill that we discussed earlier, where you have to write a sentence based on the purpose that the author wishes to establish. The author's purpose given in this question is to highlight that the narrator found the woman's comment peculiar or unusual ๐คจ. Out of the 4 choices given, only one of them conveys a sense of unknowingness from the narrator, which is B. Even if it doesn't sound the best in the passage, out of the choices given, it is the most appropriate, as all of the other sentences do not convey this reaction from the narrator, making it the correct answer.ย
In this section, we'll go over some tips & tricks particular to this section that can help you score as high as possible:
Because of the very limited amount of time given for many questions, managing your time and being efficient is critical to scoring as high as possible on this sectionโณ. One way to do this is to come up with a plan beforehand on which types of questions to tackle first (you do not need to be going in order). An example of this would be doing questions that involve correcting simple grammatical errors (commas, apostrophes, conjunctions, punctuation, etc.). As long as you know the rules of each of these grammar mechanics โ๏ธ, they typically won't take more than a minute to solve, and save you more time to focus on questions that involve style choices, word choices, or data analysis. On this section, there are more grammar questions than writing questions in this section, so by using this strategy, you could complete more than half of the questions in no time! ๐
A significant number of questions in this section will ask you to apply various grammar rules dealing with punctuation (ie. commas, periods, colons, apostrophes, etc.), conjunctions, transition words, and much more ๐ฃ. Questions like this are often straightforward, making them easy to answer if you know what rule to apply and how. Practice for grammar rules may be needed if you haven't already brushed up on those skills, but an easy way to bolster your grammar skills is simply by reading๐! In this way, you'll gain an intuition into how sentences are written, where commas are placed, and how transition words are used to connect ideas in a paragraph.ย
This one may sound a little weird, but you don't need to be reading the entire passage to answer most of the questions. UNLESS the question specifically asks you about the passage as a WHOLE โซ๏ธ, you do not need to read the entire passage before answering the question. A general rule of thumb is to read the sentence before and the sentence after the underlined portion of the question as it would help provide the context needed to answer the question presented. Doing this also saves time โณ.
Sometimes, the best way to figure out the best answer choice is to read it out using your answer in place on the underlined portion ๐งฎ. This helps you understand how the answer you picked interacts with the rest of the sentence and whether or not it satisfies the objective given in the question. This works for both grammar and writing questions!
For this tip, you do not necessarily read the entire passage to know the tone, but understanding the context and the author's perspective of the topic being written in the passage helps know what tense verbs should be in, how different individuals should be addressed as ๐จโ๐ฉโ๐งโ๐ฆ, what transition words to use when highlighting the relationship between two ideas in a paragraph, and much more.
These tips & tricks can be used on all questions of the exam regardless of the section you're on!ย
While there may be a lot of questions in such a short amount of time on the ACT English section, it can and will feel like a breeze with enough practice and strategy๐. Thanks for reading!