The Top 4 Ways to Improve Your English ACT

From Mindspire Tutoring & Test Prep

1. Rely less on your gut – learn grammar rules! A significant number of questions will straightforwardly test your understanding of concepts like punctuation usage, verb tense, and subject-verb agreement. By learning the relevant grammar rules, you can systematize your approach to the various question-types. For example, if you know your comma rules, then your approach to comma questions will always be the same, even though every passage is different.

2. Develop a methodical approach for rhetoric questions. Rhetoric questions are the ones with instructions, and they ask you to do things like add/delete sentences and move sentences around. These questions can seem subjective, but remember that there is no room for subjectivity on a multiple-choice test. Though rhetoric questions are not rule-based like grammar questions, you can still systematize your approach.

3. Learn to consistently recognize question-types! Sometimes it’s obvious what a question is testing, such as punctuation questions. You simply look at the answer choices and see that each one uses a different form of punctuation. However, other question-types are not so easy to recognize, like Modifier, Redundancy, and Subject-Verb Agreement. It will not do you much good to memorize grammar rules if you can’t recognize when to apply them. Even these question-types have identifying features, though. Memorize them, and then practice recognizing them next time you take a practice test.

4. If you have serious timing challenges in the English, identify the question-type(s) that take you the longest and commit to skipping them. If you have time left over, you can go back to answer them. For many, the most time-consuming questions are the rhetoric questions that ask you to evaluate part or all of the passage.

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