ACT English: Section Overview

Structure

The ACT English section is 75 multiple-choice questions in 45 minutes, embedded in five passages with underlined portions. Roughly 55% of the questions are usage and mechanics (grammar, punctuation, sentence structure); roughly 45% are rhetorical skills (style, organization, strategy).

You read short passages and decide whether each underlined portion is best as written ("NO CHANGE") or whether one of the alternative versions is better. NO CHANGE is correct about 25% of the time — do not avoid it on principle.

Common Question Types

About a third of the questions test commas, semicolons, colons, and apostrophes. Another quarter test verb tense and subject-verb agreement. Sentence structure (run-ons, fragments, parallelism) is another sizable chunk. The rhetorical-skills questions test transitions, sentence ordering, and "would the writer accomplish this goal" judgments.

Top Strategy

Read the sentence containing the underlined portion and one sentence on either side. Many questions test relationships across sentence boundaries.

When in doubt, choose the shortest grammatically correct option. The ACT consistently rewards conciseness.

What to do next

Drill the specific subtopics — commas, verb tense, and rhetorical-skills questions are the highest-yield places to start.