ACT Tutor Tip - English Advantage #1
The English section on the ACT has little to do with either reading or writing and much more to do with editing a paper. (Photo Credit: Nic's events via Flickr)
Hey Albuquerque Students!
The October ACT is done, but the December exam is just around the corner, and if you're score wasn't what you wanted, you may want to change a few things about how you take the test. Fortunately, we have a series of tips to help you do just that. For our first ACT Test Prep Tip, we're going to look at the first section of the test: English. While we have a whole slew of techniques that help with the English section, none are more important or easier to work with than what we call The Four Advantages.
We're starting a new series of blog posts working with each of the Four Advantages, explaining each one in detail, and giving you all the info you need to rock the English section.
Advantage 1: The Mistakes are Underlined
English is unique among the four sections of the ACT in that the majority of the problems don't actually ask you questions. Instead, you're given several passages and certain parts of those passages are underlined and marked with a number which corresponds to each question. This is a very important way to save a lot of time on the test. Because only the underlined sections have mistakes in them, those are the only sections the ACT cares about, and those should also be the only sections that you care about. So, unless you're doing one of the relatively few questions that requires some context to answer (Hint: These are generally the ones that actually have a question), there's absolutely no need to ever read a sentence that isn't underlined. So you should only be reading those sentences that do contain underlined sections.
Because seeing is believing, here's a very good example of what a paragraph on the English section could look like:
"It is no accident that my father chose to pursue the life of a sailor. Once upon a time in his village in England, every man choose to sail the open seas. Yet, throughout my life, I always had wonder why he had chosen to give it up when I was born."
As you can clearly see, out of that entire paragraph, only two small phrases have any mistakes in them. So it's entirely possible to answer two separate questions while reading only 15 words. It may seem like it's not that big of a deal when you only look at the one paragraph, but when you keep the same pattern up for 75 questions, the time you'll save becomes significant.
By itself, Advantage #1 will save you all some time and improve your scores. And we still have three more Advantages to show you! So stay tuned for next time when we talk about Advantage #2!
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If you'd like some additional help with English, or any of the other sections of the test, please contact us to schedule a free consult.