5 Things to Know for the ACT English Section

Introduction 

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 📈! 

Here's what we'll cover today:

1. • ACT English: Structure and Timing
2. • ACT English: What Do I Need to Know
3. • ACT English: Sample Questions
4. • ACT English: Specific Tips & Tricks
5. • ACT English: General Tips & Tricks Note: Keep in mind that the ACT English section refers to the section that tests your grammar and writing skills, NOT reading comprehension skills (ACT Reading is Section 3 of the exam).

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ACT English Section Structure & Timing

Here, we will discuss how this section of the exam is formatted 📝, how many questions you have to solve in the amount of time ⏰, and what types of questions you might encounter on the exam.

• • In this section, you have 45 minutes to solve 75 questions (sounds like a lot but don't panic 😭)
• • All the questions are multiple-choice, so this plays to your advantage.
• • You're given several passages to read and edit as you go along. The part that is underlined is part of the questions you'll be answering on the exam.
• • For this section, you'll be given "NO CHANGE" as one of your answer choices, which is for if you find that the underlined portion fits with the rest of the passage and does not present any stylistic or grammatical errors. 💯
• • Expect to see questions regarding grammar rules like punctuation, verb tenses, etc. c, where you'll be given a small underlined portion of the text and asked to edit based on the answer options provided.
• • You can also expect to see writing and style-based questions, where you'll be asked to rewrite the following sentence to achieve a specific purpose explained in the question.
• • Another type of question you might get on the test relates to the passage or paragraph as a whole. These questions will NOT have an underlined portion. Rather, you'll need to use what you already know about the passage to either edit or reorder the passage to make it flow smoothly and logically.

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ACT English: What Do I Need To Know?

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? 🤔

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:

Production of Writing (29-32%)

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:

• • Topic Development: This includes being able to identify the purpose of a piece of text being written, how the author's purpose has been established, and assessing the text to the author's purpose.
• • Organization, Unity, and Cohesion: This includes rewriting or reordering parts of a paragraph to make it flow logically and align with the rest of the passage. 📝

Knowledge of Language (15-17%)

According to the ACT Study Guide, this category requires you to use precise language 📕 and word choices that are appropriate for the passage based on the context provided. 

Conventions of Standard English (52-55%)

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 🔣, as well as identifying sentence structure. 

This category is broken up into three main components:

• • Sentence Structure & Formation: This includes determining the best type of sentence structure to use in rewriting an existing sentence within the passage or writing a new one based on a specific purpose.
• • Punctuation: This includes detecting errors in the different types of punctuation used (commas, apostrophes, etc.) in the text and fixing them accordingly.
• • Usage: This includes fixing problems with commonly misspelled words, misplaced modifiers, capitalization, etc. 🔠

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ACT English: Sample Questions

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 official ACT Study Guide 2023-2024. You may click the link to follow along.

Image Courtesy of Official ACT Study Guide 2023-2024

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 ✅. 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. 

Now let's look at a different type of question: 

Image Courtesy of Official ACT Study Guide 2023-2024

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 🤨. 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. 

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ACT English: Tips & Tricks

In this section, we'll go over some tips & tricks particular to this section that can help you score as high as possible:

Tip #1: Come up with a strategy on how to tackle the questions

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 section⏳. 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 ⚙️, 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! 📈

Tip #2: Knowing and Understanding Grammar Rules 

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 🔣. 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 reading📚! 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. 

Tip #3: Do NOT read the entire passage 

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 ⚫️, 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 ⏳.

Tip #4: Read the sentence using the answer you chose

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 🧮. 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!

Tip #5: Be aware of the tone and context of the passage 

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 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦, what transition words to use when highlighting the relationship between two ideas in a paragraph, and much more.

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ACT General Tips & Tricks

These tips & tricks can be used on all questions of the exam regardless of the section you're on! 

• • Use POE (Process of Elimination): This is very helpful in coming to the correct answer, especially if you're stuck in a situation where you have two similar answers and cannot decide between them. This line of thinking focuses on eliminating incorrect answers ❌ until you reach one answer, which is typically the correct one ✅.
• • If you can't answer a question, skip it: Every question is worth the same amount of points 🧮, so instead of spending time on a question you just can't seem to figure out, save it for later and go on to the other questions. It's better to get that one question wrong than to get multiple questions omitted from your score simply because you couldn't finish the test in time. If you come back to the question and you still can't figure it out, just guess! You have a 20% chance of getting it correct, which is better than no chance if you leave it blank.
• • PRACTICE PRACTICE PRACTICE: For tests like these, practice really does make it perfect. It is not enough to read every single Fiveable ACT study guide to do well on the ACT. You need to be applying these concepts and tips from the guides by taking practice tests! These can be found on the ACT website.

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Conclusion

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 strategy👏. Thanks for reading!