Here are 3 easy tips and tricks to help bump your score on the English section of your ACT. Use these to buy yourself time by knocking down the occasional easy question. Feel free to leave a comment sharing what you learned!
Short and Simple
When it comes to the ACT, simplicity is king. Many questions present answer choices that aren’t necessarily incorrect, but they still create convoluted sentences. It’s easy to get bogged down in the wording of these types of questions, costing yourself precious time. Fortunately, with some practice, it’s easy to spot questions trying to trick you into wasting your time. Just remember to keep it short, sweet, and simple. Here’s an example:
Walker Lee had began his career in hand-forged ironwork at the age of 30.
- NO CHANGE
- had begun
- begun
- began
Have an answer?
The correct answer is D. You could already knock down two of the four answer choices by making sure to keep it short, leaving you with C and D. From there, you just have to determine the correct tense for the sentence. Either way, you increased your odds from 25% to 50%.
Answer Patterns
Certain answer choices can also be removed simply by looking at them. Notably, on the ACT, semicolons and periods are interchangeable on any two answer choices. Thus, if you see two answer choices that would be otherwise identical if not for the period/semicolon, then you can already cross those out. This already increases your odds to 50%, and saves you precious time on the exam.
Read Carefully
Lastly, I cannot overstate the importance of reading every answer choice carefully. Many questions don’t have an explicitly right or wrong answer, so it’s important that you read the whole question, identify what it’s asking, and match the best possible answer choice. Here’s an example:
The writer wants to balance statements made in
an earlier part of an essay with a related detail that
reveals why the narrator wants to preserve his history.
Given that all of the choices are true, which one best
accomplishes this goal?
NO CHANGE- we can tell our stories through the records of our
past. - family goes on forever.
- people can reminisce over photo albums and scrapbooks.
Have an answer?
On its own, this question may have been tricky. After all, you don’t have any passage to read from! However, reading the question carefully gives us a key clue: it’s looking for a related detail revealing why the narrator wants to preserve some sort of history. A is crossed out, since there is no passage, so we already have one less answer choice to work with. Between the remaining three, C does not contain a specific detail, since “family goes on forever” is more of a saying than a detail. B is not only lengthy, but it also does not include a specific detail. Sure, we can tell stories through records of the past, but D says nearly the same thing. Moreover, D actually includes specific details (“photo albums” and “scrapbooks”), which is why D is the correct answer choice.