ACT English test preparation and practice make perfect

The ACT test can be daunting, especially for newbies and beginners. It takes a lot of preparation and practice to build your confidence on ACT test day. So what ACT preparation methods are considered effective? You will want to pass the ACT with flying colors in order to get into the college of your choice. Among the most challenging sections of this test is the ACT English test. As with the other topics, your goal is to get foolproof tips on how to excel on your ACT English test. You will find them in the discussion below.

Master the ACT English test with these valuable tips

Avoid giving lengthy answers. That is, keep it simple when you convey your thoughts and ideas on the ACT English test. It’s not like you have to give short answers either. Sometimes you need to put more words in your sentences and sentences to make them grammatically correct. The key to providing efficient answers on your ACT English is to be concise and to the point.

Read the complete sentences in the questions. Do not rush when answering the test questions. It will make you feel exhausted and messy when responding to the items. It can be tempting to only read the underlined part of the sentence, but steer clear of this tendency. Please note that the incorrect clause or clauses in your award may affect your answer.

Consider the context and meaning of the test items. Just because you’re tackling the grammar part of the test doesn’t mean you should be ignorant of the meaning of the sentence. Many of the ACT English questions require context to be taken into account. This should be applied, especially in transition word questions and questions that require you to find the proper placement of a sentence throughout the paragraph.

Note the consistency of the sentence. An important example of this is the proper placement of tense and voice. When adding the tense of the sentence, look for clues in the surrounding sentences and assign their tenses. But there are exceptions, such as when a certain clause conveys a past event within a paragraph that is set in the present tense.

Stay away from being redundant. Avoid a statement of meaning or an idea that has already been conveyed or implied. Also, refrain from using two adjectives that mean the same thing. As mentioned earlier in this text, keep your rewards simple and consider the entire reward when answering the questions. Remember that reading only the underlined phrase in the items can make you mistaken in the other parts that also express the same idea.

Apply the rule of sentence parallelism in grammar. You can easily spot the parallelism of ideas in a sentence the more you become familiar with them. A sentence that is parallel has clauses that agree in structure. An example of a sentence that lacks parallelism is:

My hobbies are swimming, running and singing.

“Swim” and “run” are in the gerund form, while “sing” is in the infinitive form. The above sentence can become parallel if the infinitive form “to sing” is changed to its gerund form which is “singing”.

Be careful with running sentences. In everyday writing, common errors, such as comma splices, can also show up as errors on the ACT English test. A sentence becomes a corrido if it is understood as a comma splice in which two independent clauses are combined with only one comma. If an independent clause can stand on its own as a sentence, then it has a complete thought. Adding a conjunction rectifies a comma splice. The same thing happens when one of the clauses is made dependent or when a comma is changed to a semicolon.

Note the subject-verb agreement. If a subject is singular, it has to be connected to a verb that is singular. In the same way, plural subjects must be followed by plural verbs. Generally, errors in subject-verb agreement are easily detected if the subject and verb are next to each other. The tricky part is when they aren’t, specifically if prepositional sentences are placed between them. If you want to end this dilemma, delete the prepositional phrase and find out if the subject and verb agree with each other now that they are next to each other. Don’t confuse the object of the prepositional phrase with the subject.

Be particular about pronoun-antecedent agreement. The noun that replaces the pronoun in a sentence is known as the antecedent. To check accuracy, you can mark the pronoun with an arrow pointing toward its antecedent. Make sure they agree in gender and number. As examples, the pronoun “they” can refer to the antecedent “students”, and these are plural, while the pronoun “she”, which is singular, can refer to the feminine antecedent “Jane”, which is singular.

Make sure the ideas from the current and previous paragraphs are included in the transition sentences. There are items on the ACT English test where you will be asked to choose the most appropriate opening or closing sentence in a paragraph. You’ll want your awards to create a smooth transition by incorporating ideas into your awards from the current, previous, or next paragraphs. Your goal here is to connect two ideas, which is why the ideas in the surrounding paragraphs should be considered.

Be one step ahead, ACT English can be tricky

Because the ACT English test can be tricky, you also need to be careful. As you continue with the necessary preparation, stay one step ahead by being armed with tips on how to approach questions. You can always take practice tests, but be aware of the structure, context, and meaning of test items. Well-equipped with intelligence, skills, and confidence, you can pass your ACT English test and pursue your desired higher learning at the university of your choice.