ACT English study guide
ACT English · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
The ACT English Test is one section of the ACT, a standardized college-admission exam administered by ACT Education Corp. and accepted by colleges across the United States. The English section is a multiple-choice test of editing and revising skills: candidates read short passages and decide whether underlined portions are correct as written or should be replaced, added, or removed. Questions fall into three broad areas - production of writing (topic development, organization, and cohesion), knowledge of language (word choice, style, and precision), and conventions of standard English (grammar, usage, punctuation, and sentence structure). Topics on this exam: Production of Writing, Knowledge of Language, and Conventions of Standard English. The ACT English study guide has 3 sections and about 911 words.
01Production of Writing: Purpose, Unity, and Cohesion
Production of Writing questions ask whether a passage does its job: whether a sentence belongs, whether a paragraph stays on topic, whether ideas flow in a logical order, and whether an introduction or conclusion actually does what it claims. Treat every passage as an argument with a job to do. Topic and purpose : identify the passage's main point in one sentence before judging any detail. Relevance : a sentence earns its place only if it supports the stated purpose.
318 words, about 2 min02Knowledge of Language: Precision, Tone, and Style
Knowledge of Language questions test whether a word or phrase is precise , appropriate in tone , and consistent with the passage's style . These questions rarely have a grammar error; the wrong answers are grammatical but clumsy, vague, or off-register. Precision : choose the word that expresses the intended meaning most exactly ("glanced" vs. Concision : prefer the shortest version that keeps the meaning; redundancy ("annually every year") and wordiness are common targets.
296 words, about 1 min03Conventions of Standard English: Grammar, Usage, and Punctuation
Conventions questions test standard written English: sentence boundaries, subject-verb agreement, pronoun case and reference, verb tense, modifiers, parallelism, and punctuation (commas, semicolons, colons, dashes, apostrophes). Sentence boundaries : a comma cannot join two independent clauses (comma splice); use a period, semicolon, or conjunction. Agreement : the verb agrees with its subject, not with an intervening phrase; indefinite pronouns (each, everyone, neither) are singular. Pronoun reference : every pronoun needs one clear antecedent, and case must match its function (subject vs.
297 words, about 1 min