1. How to Crack the ACT English Test Chapter 5 An Introduction to the ACT English Test

2. The English test does not test how well you write It tests how well you know and can apply the rules of standard written English The ACT is a standardized test so it always tests the same basic concepts If you don’t know what the question is testing, you can look at the clues In this chapter you will learn to find these clues and use them along with along with test strategies to get a higher English score

3. What the English Test tests The English test measures how well you understand “the conventions of standard written English” There are 5 passages to read Portions of each passage will be underlined You must decide Are the portions written correctly Or whether one og the other answer choices are better

4. Some questions are designed to measure your knowledge of Punctuation Grammar Sentence structure Other questions are designed to see if you know How to revise and strengthen a passage How to change particular words for style or clarity How to explain or support a point of view more clearly or effectively

5. There are a total of 75 questions to answer in 45 minutes You do not have to be a strong writer to do well on this test You do need to know what types of errors come up again and again and how to fix them

6. What do the Passages look like Handout Most of the questions refer to individual words or phrases in the passage; these words are underlined and numbered A few of the questions (such as question 5) ask you about the organization of a paragraph. You can tell what paragraph hey ask about by looking for the question number in the a box at the end of a paragraph You will also see a few questions that ask you about the passage as a whole (number 6)

7. By the way, the answers are: 1. C 2. G 3. A 4. G 5. B 6. F

8. Triage In the English test, the ACT writer have concocted there own brand of triage for you Specific questions on punctuation, grammar and sentence structure tend to come early in the passage Usually there will be one or two questions about style or rhetoric at the end of the passage – these deal with the passage as a whole

9. First Pass, Second Pass On the first pass, answer all the question that you know you can answer quickly and confidently On the second pass, answer the questions that require more thought or that you skipped the first time through Use POE to help you get rid of wrong answers

10. Looking for Clues One of the ways to look for errors is to search the answer choices for clues The underlined portions are very short – so it’s easy to see how each choice is different from the others These differences offer a strong indication of what is on the minds of the ACT writers

11. Look at the following example 27. A. NO CHANGE B. One goes C. you go D. He goes Clearly this question is about pronouns Even if you didn’t spot anything wrong with the underlined passage as you read it The answer choices are telling you to check and see if the pronoun agrees with the noun in the passage

12. What if there is more than one thing wrong? There is often more than one error in the underlined portion of a sentence First find one error Eliminate the answer choices that contain the same error Then compare the remaining answer choices Regardless of the number of errors you find in the question, keep your focus on the differences in the answer choices

13. NO CHANGE Many of the questions in this test have NO CHANGE as the first of the answer choices DO NOT assume that there is always something wrong with the passage NO CHANGE turns out to be the correct answer a little less than a quarter of the time it is offered SO DON’T BE AFRAID TO USE IT!

14. OMIT the underlined portion A few of the questions in this test will have “OMIT the underlined portion” as the last of the four answer choices When this choice is offered, it has a high probability of being correct – better than 50% of the time on recent test But, don’t just choose it every time you see it It is worth noting that when you see the word OMIT, you should examine it very carefully

15. Before We Begin, Some Terminology The ACT is not going to test you on parts of speech or diagram a sentence, but it will be helpful to know some basic definitions. Tom broke the vase This sentence is made up of two nouns a verb and an article

16. Tom broke the vase A noun is a word used to name a person, a place, a thing, or an idea A verb is a word that expresses action An article is a word that modifies or limits a noun

17. Tom accidentally broke the big vase of flowers We’ve added an adverb, an adjective, and a prepositional phrase to the original sentence An adverb is a word that modifies a verb, an adjective, or another adverb An adjective is a word that modifies a noun A preposition is a word that notes the relation of a noun to an action or a thing

18. Tom accidentally broke the big vase of flowers. A phrase is a group of words that acts as a single part of speech. A phrase is missing either a subject, a verb or both.