How to Get a Perfect 36 on ACT English An Intergalactic Guide

A short time ago, in a galaxy thatswell, okay, our galaxyTina Fey showed us all how Star Wars can be useful in everyday life: But did you also know that it can be useful when studying for the ACT English test? Thats right: the same principles guiding the series of films in which half of the characters only grunt or beep will actually lead you to ACT success! How does this work? Hop aboard the Millennium Falcon and find out Table of Contents The Least You Should Know About ACT English Use the Force, Luke: Timing on ACT English Never Tell Me the Odds: Scoring on the ACT English Test I’d Just as Soon Kiss a Wookie: Choosing the ACT This Is Where the Fun Begins: Skills Tested on ACT English These ARE the Droids You’re Looking For: Question Types Reading ACT English Passages ACT English Quiz Help Me, Obi-Wan Kenobi: Struggles on the ACT English Test Stay in Attack Formation: Raising Your ACT English Score 2, questions Conventions of Standard English (Usage/Mechanics): 22-24 questions Sentence Structure and Formation Punctuation Usage Its a good idea to copy out that list and keep it somewhere as you study, as it can help direct your ACT English prep. For example, did you notice that sentence structure questions are far more common than every other question type? Of course, eventually youll want to study every type of ACT English question (maybe want is a strong word there†¦), but this list gives you a good idea of where to start. For more info, take a look at our post on the most frequently tested ACT English topics. Reading ACT English Passages If youve made it this far in the post, you clearly know how to read. But do you know how to read ACT English passages? Turns out, theyre an entirely different ball game†¦ This is one of the questions tutors get the most: to read the whole passage, or not to read the whole passage? Its a waste of time to read the whole passage before you answer questions. But should you answer questions first? Keep in mind that the answer you need could be a few sentences away. The best strategy is to compromise: read the passage paragraph-by-paragraph. Answer questions relating to the paragraph before moving on. This will ensure that youre not taking up loads of time reading text you dont need to, and also that you dont miss any questions because you didnt read enough!s ACT English Quiz Now that youve learned about the ACT English tests format, timing, and question types, take a look at the following quiz to put your new knowledge into practice with some sample ACT English questions! (Note that the passages are slightly shorter than what youll see on test day.) document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", function(event) { if(!window.jQuery) alert("The important jQuery library is not properly loaded in your site. Your WordPress theme is probably missing the essential wp_head() call. You can switch to another theme and you will see that the plugin works fine and this notice disappears. If you are still not sure what to do you can contact us for help."); }); 1. As the sun was slowly rising (1) over the Atlantic Ocean and painted New York harbor a spectacular fiery orange, I started my old Toyota’s engine. At this early hour, there was still some semblance of the night’s tranquility left on the city sidewalks, but I knew that, as the minutes ticked by, the streets would flood with humanity. (2) NO CHANGErising slowlyrose slowlycontinued to riseQuestion 1 of 5 2. As the sun was slowly rising (1) over the Atlantic Ocean and painted New York harbor a spectacular fiery orange, I started my old Toyota’s engine. At this early hour, there was still some semblance of the night’s tranquility left on the city sidewalks, but I knew that, as the minutes ticked by, the streets would flood with humanity. (2) NO CHANGEwere about to floodwould be floodingwere floodingQuestion 2 of 5 3. When Star Wars creator George Lucas and his team began casting the first film now known as Episode IV: A New Hope Lucas placed little importance on the actors (3). He believed that audiences would come to see the film for its special effects and the story, rather than the actors. Because of this (4), his original script was vague about who should play the roles of what would eventually be three iconic characters: Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Princess Leia. With casting director Dianne Crittenden and his co-writer/director Brian de Palma, Lucas saw around 3,500 actors when casting the film. Because he had ironically (5) not found the characters important enough to specify their characteristics, he had to spend hours watching the auditions of multitudes of actors and actresses. Auditioning actors report that the dialogue was difficult to say due to its jargon, further emphasizing Lucas's focus on the technical effects rather than the characters in the film. Eventually, Lucas, de Palma, and Crittenden cast the now-legendary team of actors: Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, and Harrison Ford. The original Star Wars trilogy catapulted the trio to superstardom. NO CHANGEWhen Star Wars creator George Lucas and his team, at the beginning of their casting the first film, now known as Episode IV: A New Hope Lucas placed little importance on the actors.When Star Wars creator George Lucas and his team began casting the first film, now known as Episode IV: A New Hope, Lucas placed little importance on the actors.When Star Wars creator George Lucas and his team began casting the first film, now known as Episode IV: A New Hope Lucas placed little importance on the actors.Question 3 of 5 4. When Star Wars creator George Lucas and his team began casting the first film now known as Episode IV: A New Hope Lucas placed little importance on the actors (3). He believed that audiences would come to see the film for its special effects and the story, rather than the actors. Because of this (4), his original script was vague about who should play the roles of what would eventually be three iconic characters: Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Princess Leia. With casting director Dianne Crittenden and his co-writer/director Brian de Palma, Lucas saw around 3,500 actors when casting the film. Because he had ironically (5) not found the characters important enough to specify their characteristics, he had to spend hours watching the auditions of multitudes of actors and actresses. Auditioning actors report that the dialogue was difficult to say due to its jargon, further emphasizing Lucas's focus on the technical effects rather than the characters in the film. Eventually, Lucas, de Palma, and Crittenden cast the now-legendary team of actors: Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, and Harrison Ford. The original Star Wars trilogy catapulted the trio to superstardom. NO CHANGEAccordinglyDespite thisNeverthelessQuestion 4 of 5 5. When Star Wars creator George Lucas and his team began casting the first film now known as Episode IV: A New Hope Lucas placed little importance on the actors (3). He believed that audiences would come to see the film for its special effects and the story, rather than the actors. Because of this (4), his original script was vague about who should play the roles of what would eventually be three iconic characters: Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Princess Leia. With casting director Dianne Crittenden and his co-writer/director Brian de Palma, Lucas saw around 3,500 actors when casting the film. Because he had ironically (5) not found the characters important enough to specify their characteristics, he had to spend hours watching the auditions of multitudes of actors and actresses. Auditioning actors report that the dialogue was difficult to say due to its jargon, further emphasizing Lucas's focus on the technical effects rather than the characters in the film. Eventually, Lucas, de Palma, and Crittenden cast the now-legendary team of actors: Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, and Harrison Ford. The original Star Wars trilogy catapulted the trio to superstardom. The best placement for the underlined word would be: where it is now.before the word because.after the word specify.after the word hours.Question 5 of 5 Loading... //jQuery(document).ready(function(){ document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", function(event) { var question_ids = "41,42,43,44,45"; WatuPROSettings[10] = {}; WatuPRO.qArr = question_ids.split(','); WatuPRO.exam_id = 10; WatuPRO.post_id = 11230; WatuPRO.store_progress = 0; WatuPRO.requiredIDs="0".split(","); WatuPRO.hAppID = "0.62390800 1580752805"; var url = "https://magoosh.com/hs/wp-content/plugins/watupro/show_exam.php"; WatuPRO.examMode = 0; WatuPRO.siteURL="https://magoosh.com/hs/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php"; WatuPROIntel.init(10); }); If you find those easy, why not try out some super-challenging ACT English problems here? Help Me, Obi-Wan Kenobi: Struggles on the ACT English Test As it turns out, of course, Obi-Wan doesnt have all the answers. However, hes been around a little while, and he does know where those Jedi knights seem to struggle. (Yes, in this scenario, I am Obi-Wan. Im fine with it.) For most people preparing for ACT English, some struggles are bound to come up along the journey. When this happens, take a step back. Realize that the strategies that have worked for you up to this point may not be working anymore, and that you might have to review the materials and schedule youve been using. However, know that by working on just a few areas where a lot of students struggle, breaking through to the next level doesnt have to be difficult! Where Most Students Struggle on ACT English One major issue that students struggle with on ACT English actually doesnt happen on test day, but rather occurs during prep. This is failing to identify issues in the questions you got wrong. In other words, not understanding why you got certain questions wrong. Particularly if youre working on your own, as opposed to in a class or with a tutor, this can be frustrating. One of the best things to do in this case is to make sure youre using good materials that provide answers and explanations, so that you know exactly how to get similar problems right next time. Another good practice is to keep an error log, which you can read about here. Use the error log for ACT English practice questions as test day approaches; its the best practice you can have, because you know that those problems challenged you in the past! Where Do Students Lose the Most Points on ACT English? With that said, a big reason that students lose points on test day has to do with not reading enough of each passage. Recent ACT English tests have become more sophisticated, and sometimes the clue you need to answer a question is a few sentences away. Dont worry about this affecting your timing. You can use the strategies in this post to get faster on ACT English without losing accuracy; as you use them, keep in mind that cutting down on the amount of each passage you read is not the key to getting faster! I know it seems like reading less should save you time. And a lot of my students have argued this point with me in the past, truly believing that reading the underlined portion of the passage alone is the key to mastering ACT English timing. But its not! When working on ACT English problems, you have to remember that nearly half of them test rhetorical skills. This means that a sentence may be all right grammatically, but it doesnt make sense in context. To identify and correct these sentences, youll need to take a look at the big picture: read well before and after the underlined portion. It takes slightly more time, yesbut it greatly increases your accuracy. After all, theres no difference between answering 40 out of 40 questions correctly and 40 out of 75 questions correctly, so dont sacrifice accuracy for the sake of speed! What to Do When Youre Running out of Time This is a question I get all the time about the ACT as a whole. A general point about all sections of the ACT is that you dont lose points for wrong or answers, so its always worth eliminating obviously wrong answer choices and then taking your best guess. If you have only a minute or two left on the section, you should bubble in answers at random for the remaining answers: it cant hurt and it just may help. So what kinds of answers should you go for when youre quickly skimming? First of all, look for questions that include the answer choice â€Å"OMIT the underlined portion†: You will often see an answer choice with this phrase. While it is not always correct, it is a good place to start! Ask yourself if the sentence makes sense without the underlined phrase. Is the sentence suddenly clearer or less wordy? If the meaning of the sentence doesn’t change, and the underlined portion is unnecessary, choose â€Å"OMIT†! On that same note, keep in mind that the ACT almost always prefers the shortest, most concise answer choice. The correct answer choice is often (though not always!) the shortest one. Why? A lot of us are in the habit of overwriting, making sentences more complicated than they need to be. For this reason, when you come across answer choices with very different answer choices, the shortest one is a good choice. Just remember: short and sweet. Stay in Attack Formation: A Guide to Improving Your ACT English Score by 2, 4, or 6 Points Unlike the rebel commanders, I am definitely going to spell things out before letting you hop in yourumstar rockets? (So I dont know all the lingo. Sorry!) Even if you knew nothing about ACT English before starting this post, you now have a ton of info that will already help you boost your score, from the big background ideas that govern the tests construction to the nitty-gritty about ACT English answer choices. By applying what weve already discussed to your study plan, you have what you need to start improving your score. But when youre trying to improve your score by leaps and bounds, sometimes it may take a more targeted, strategic approach. With that in mind, lets look at what you can do to raise your ACT English score by 2, 4, or even 6 points! Raising Your ACT English Score by 2 Points Particularly if youre new to ACT English, if you find that you rarely finish the ACT English test, or if youre far more accurate in your lessons and on practice questions than you are when taking the exam sections, learning how to get faster on ACT English without losing accuracy can make a huge difference in your score. Sure, you might be thinking, but how big? Actually, if you look at ACT English raw to scaled scores, youll see that answering even two more questions correctly can take you from a 30 to a 32, or a 28 to a 30, while answering three more correctly could take you from a 28 to a 31. Thats nothing to turn up your nose at! So with that in mind, heres a quick guide to training yourself to be faster on ACT English. Maximizing ACT English Timing Do you run out of time on ACT English? (Or, for that matter, any other section of the ACT?) As you take your weekly ACT English practice tests (yup, you should be taking them weekly to maximize your score), work within the standard time limits. During the week, work through lessons and practice sets. These practice sets are where you can really start to shave seconds off your time. Heres a method you can use to speed up (note that you will need a lot of solid materials you can use as practice sets): Give yourself a set of 10 ACT English practice problems you havent done before. Time yourself as you take them, but dont stop when five minutes are up. In fact, dont look at the clock at all as you work through the problems. When you have finished, stop the clock and grade them. If you answered fewer than 6 questions correctly, its a good idea to work on your accuracy before moving on to speed. If you answered more than 6 questions correctly, mark your accuracy score (e.g. 8 of 10 questions = 80%) and the time it took you to answer them on top of the page. The next time you sit down to answer a practice set of problems, shave 10-20 seconds off of your original time. If it took you 10 minutes to answer 10 questions with 80% accuracy last time, give yourself 9:45 this time. When you have finished this second set, check your accuracy score. If it is below your original accuracy score, keep working with this timing until you can consistently match or exceed your initial accuracy score, at which point you can shave another 10-20 seconds off your overall time. Keep going until youre down to 5 minutes per ten questions. This is a process that will take some time to master; for many students, it may take a month or more. However, for a lot of test-takers, the biggest pitfall they face on ACT English is time. By mastering it, youll see your test scores shoot up. Raising Your ACT English Score by 4 Points If youre looking to boost your ACT English score by four points, know that it can be donebut itll take some work! This is a big leap, and the first thing you should do is apply the advice from earlier in this post, including the tips for boosting your score by two points, to your studying. After that, though, what can you do to get those remaining two points? Again looking at raw to scaled scores, you can see that a four-point difference on ACT English can mean answering between four more questions (30 to 34) to ten more questions (16 to 20) correctly. Ten is a lot, but youll already pick up a few more points as you get faster at answering ACT English questions. To pick up even more points, youll want to start paying more attention to punctuation on ACT English. Why punctuation? In the first place, it accounts for 12 problems, or nearly 20% of your score. In the second place, punctuation has clear and learnable rules that are relatively simple to use correctly in context once you learn them. Check out the Magoosh ACT eBook (its free!) for the rundown on commas, semicolons, colons, apostrophes, and dashes. Raising Your ACT English Score by 6 Points Super ambitious? Making a 6-point leap in your ACT English score isnt going to be easy, but its definitely possible with hard work and careful planning (and lots of practice). 6 points on the ACT can mean answer as few as 8 more questions correctly (to go from a 30 to a 36) or as many as 16 (to go from a 6 to a 12). The first thing you should do is to read the advice for 2- and 4-point boosts. But what then? Then, youre going to have to get even more specific. What you do next will depend on where youre currently scoring. If youre currently scoring below a 20, keep working on your timing and accuracy. Chances are youre not finishing all of the questions in this section; if you are, you should probably spend more time on each one. Answering fewer questions, but answering them correctly, can be the key to cracking the 20s. If youre currently scoring in the 20s, its time to work on your Achilles heel! At this level, you are most likely doing much better in either Usage and Mechanics or in Rhetorical Skills. In my experience, its more likely that youre scoring better in Usage and Mechanics, as Rhetorical Skills (testing structure, organization, and style) can feel overwhelming and vague to students, especially in comparison to the strict rules sentences should follow in Usage and Mechanics. Polish up on your Rhetorical Skills with the free Magoosh eBook and with our posts on ACT English style questions and strategy questions. You can also access the following official Magoosh lessons on Rhetorical Skills topics for free (!!): Writers/Essay Goal Adding or Deleting Sentences Best Illustration Questions Introducing and Concluding Paragraphs. If youre trying to break a 30 (or trying to break a 36!), youll need to individualize your plan even more. At this point, its likely that only the trickiest questions are tripping you up, and these could be in a wide variety of areas. As I already mentioned, keep an error log to spot patterns that are keeping you from scoring where you want to. Idioms questions often present even top English students with trouble; if this is you, check out Magooshs post on idioms and our video post on idioms here. Other tricky question types include those that feature redundant meanings and those testing for wordiness. You can access Magooshs video lessons on redundancy here and on concision and wordiness here, both for free. Sometimes I Even Amaze Myself: How to Get a Perfect 36 on the ACT English Test Hmm. The answer to this question reminds me of that old joke: How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice! And thats the same thing you need to do to get a perfect score on ACT English. That sounds like rote advice, but theres good reasoning behind it. When youve taught the ACT for a while, you see just how formulaic a lot of ACT questions areand nowhere is this more true than on ACT English. Yes, the sentences themselves change, but the patterns of error dont. Keeping an error log is especially vital when youre working to get a top score on ACT English. By the time youre scoring in the 30s, your errors are most likely scattered among different topic areas. In most cases, high-scoring students miss questions because they dont realize what theyre asking. By keeping an error log and returning to it for practice, youll be increasingly likely to recognize exactly what each question is asking. Keep in mind that getting a perfect score on the ACT English test means answering every single question correctly: 75 out of 75. Make sure you have an excellent grounding in ACT English timing by practicing the steps laid out under How to Improve Your ACT English Score 2 Points. Finally, dont beat yourself up if you dont get a perfect 36. A 35 (or really any score in the 30s) will still look great on your college applications, and it is a far, far better use of time to work on your college applications than it is to re-take the ACT just to see if you can get that extra point. It really will not make a whit of difference to admissions officers, while a hastily written essay definitely will. Theres No Such Thing as Luck: More Resources First of all, congratulations on making it through this whistle-stop tour of ACT English! Weve covered a ton of information, so you may want to bookmark this page and come back to different sections as you go through your ACT English prep. In the meantime, whats next? First of all, because we love our readers so much, weve made several Magoosh ACT English lessons available for free! You can check out the following lessons to help you with particular areas of ACT English: Subject-Verb Agreement Verb Tenses Idioms Dependent and Independent Clauses Run-On Sentences and Comma Splices Next, explore the Magoosh blog for expert help. Heres some great English practice; and heres advice on how to deal with various types of ACT English questions: Organization Questions Parallelism Appositives Sentence Fragments (1, 2) Comma Splices Conjunctions (1, 2) Verbs (1, 2) Word Forms Common Modals (1, 2) Pronouns Its also a good idea to check out the official ACT website for materials and prep. Finally, make sure that you have your ACT study schedule sorted out; we have one that can help you master the exam, whether you have a week or three months (or more) to prepare! A Final Word Now that youve become a Jedi Master, check out: Your Magical Guide to Scoring a Perfect 12 on the ACT Essay How to Get a Perfect 36 on ACT Math: The Jurassic Guide How to Get a Perfect 36 on ACT Science: The Dark Knights Guide How to Get a Perfect 36 on the ACT Reading Test: A Tropical Guide Good luckand, of course†¦