English Practice for the ACT

How the English section is scored

Your raw score (number correct out of 75) is converted to a scaled 1–36 score using a per-form curve. There is no penalty for wrong answers; always fill in every bubble. The English score also feeds into the optional "ELA" combined score along with Reading and the writing test, if you take it.

Strategy notes

Read the sentence containing the underlined portion and one sentence on either side. The ACT routinely tests transitions, antecedent agreement, and verb tense across sentence boundaries — looking only at the underlined chunk will lose you points on roughly a third of the section.

When two answer choices say almost the same thing in different words, neither is right. The ACT does not have two correct answers. If two options are equivalent in meaning, both are wrong, and the correct answer is one of the other two.

Default to the shortest grammatically correct option. The ACT prefers concise, direct prose over flowery alternatives. If two answers are both grammatically fine, the shorter one is almost always the intended answer.

Common mistakes

• Choosing an answer that "sounds smart" rather than the one that is grammatically correct and concise.
• Skimming past the question stem on rhetorical-skills questions — those questions ask something specific (e.g. "best transitions to the next paragraph") and a grammatically perfect answer can still be wrong.
• Forgetting that "NO CHANGE" is correct about a quarter of the time. Do not avoid it on principle.
• Treating commas as breath marks. The ACT tests specific comma rules; if you cannot name the rule, the comma probably does not belong.

What to drill first

Start with comma usage and verb-tense agreement — together they account for nearly a third of the English section. Then move into sentence structure (run-ons and fragments), then rhetorical-skills passages.