<p>I asked a lot of high ACT scorers in my school how they improved in english and they said they learned all the grammar and punctuation rules.</p>
<p>I don't think all those rules are covered in the PR:cracking the act since I read the book. is there anyway i can learn all these rules??</p>
<p>I think a lot of those rules are covered in the PR cracking the act. Is it the one with the girl on the cover and it’s this years edition? I think that helped my score… not sure yet… I’ll see in June… I took the April 14th one and i got a 24 on English but i got the Real ACT prep guide book and took the 1st practice test and got a 29 on English and that was after just reading a little bit of stuff from the PR: cracking the act. Barrons perfect 36 is also really good for the grammar and punctuation rules. Actually I think it’s better than the PR because it tells you even more stuff. Haha… Well i hope the books are good… if i get a 24 again on that part in June i will be so angry lol.</p>
<p>I suggest that you be careful with Barrons books. They often do tell you more than other books, but often that “more” isn’t actually needed for the real test. Some students like preparing with Barrons, the same way some people like training with ankle weights on: the actual test experience feels a bit easy compared to the prep they did and the practice tests they took. Others can get stressed out by all the stuff Barrons wants to teach you and test you on. Make the best choice for yourself, depending on what kind of person and student you are.</p>
<p>PR Cracking does a good job of going through most of the rules you will see on the ACT. Anything they don’t cover will come up in real ACT practice tests (I assume you have the red book?). It’s absolutely crucial to go over what you got wrong in practice tests and figure out why/what the rule is. Some students find it helpful to keep a list of the rules that apply to the questions they got wrong.</p>
<p>Be careful of using up your “real” ACT practice tests, though. There are a limited number of these. The tests in Princeton Review’s 1296 Practice Questions book are pretty good, with the exception of a bad question here or there. You can definitely use these for practice, though, to teach yourself the rules.</p>
<p>I suggest regularly returning to the questions you got wrong and testing yourself on them again to make sure you know this material. Having two copies of the book, one that you leave unmarked, is helpful for this.</p>
<p>Good luck with your studying!</p>
<p>My daughter was able to improve her English score by taking lots of practice tests and going over basic grammar rules. We were able to just google grammar sites and a bunch of stuff came up. In her practice tests she would usually get around a 28, but on her 2 real tests she got a 34 and a 32 respectively. I think what helped her was doing a lot of practice tests; if you do enough, you come across a good representative sample of the types of questions that are asked on the English section of the test. Also, she went over the grammar rules she had trouble with such as when to use commas vs. semicolons and when to use who vs. whom. I also think on the English section they ask questions about the format of the passages, like for example if you should move sentences or paragraphs around to make the passage sound better. Those types of questions are actually really hard for my daughter, but taking a lot of practice tests and then learning from her mistakes ultimately helped her immensely. I would think that any book that goes over grammar rules would help you, but I also agree w/the previous poster who said sometimes less is more. You don’t necessarily want to waste your time going over things that won’t be covered in the test, you know? </p>
<p>You didn’t mention whether or not you had the red book yet - that’s the Real ACT Book. If not, get that book and do the practice tests from that book before you do any from any other book. The red book has actual “real” retired ACT tests, so I think it definitely gives you the most realistic questions and the types of questions most likely to be asked on a real ACT test.</p>
<p>Good luck!!</p>