<p>I don't get it. I took my ACT with no copious preparation, and only scored a 28!</p>
<p>My scores were as follows:</p>
<p>English- 33 (Essay- 11)
Math- 27 (I have it up to a 32 now at home)
Science- 26 (Haven't started prepping for it yet)
Reading- 24</p>
<p>Can someone be a good writer, but a poor reader. I have the most advanced vocabulary in my school (I guess those days of reading Merriam-Webster Dictionaries finally paid off) and I received an 11 on both my SAT and ACT essay, but my ACT and SAT reading sections are terrible! I can read and retain much more information than the average person, but I subvocalize and I feel as though every answer to each question is pretty good. I ended up getting almost every non-fiction question correct, yet I scored below average on fiction! </p>
<p>Any tips would be greatly appreciated!</p>
<p>You mentioned sub-vocalization, so you’re aware of it; that’s a good start. Now you just have to work on being about to control it. If you don’t sub-vocalize you will be able to read faster, and faster reading speed roughly correlates with a higher ACT reading score.</p>
<p>You can fix the issue of thinking every answer sounds good by doing a few things. The easiest one is don’t look at the answers immediately after reading the question; first, quickly come up with an answer to the question by yourself. The tip that really helps me is that you should always know the tone of the essay; if an answer choice doesn’t sound like it matches the tone of the essay, it’s wrong. This tone strategy can usually eliminate many answer choices.</p>
<p>I usually try to read the passages in between 2.5 and 3.5 minutes. If you can’t do that, you have to improve your reading speed. You can do this by just plain reading more and consciously trying to read faster. If you read slowly enough, using a finger can definitely help. However, some just find the finger distracting. Another mistake people make is getting caught up in the details of the passages. The details are not important when you first go through the passage. You just need to understand the general idea, tone, and structure of the passage. I like to write words or phrases summarizing each paragraph.</p>
<p>You have to read the whole prose passage, and it has the most inference questions, so the only way you can get better at those is by improving your understanding. Watch for development of characters, the author’s tone, the opinions of characters, and just general plot development.</p>
<p>You really just need practice. The Red Book is very useful because it has 5 read tests and answer explanations for all of them. I have gone from a 23 to 31 in reading in just 5 test. Reading is also my weakest subscore (by a lot unfortunately haha). Good luck!</p>
<p>Are those official? </p>
<p>And you can be a good writer, but a “poor” reader. That was me. I earned high 30s on english but mid to high 20s on reading. it was annoying. However, i came to realize I over thought the reading. All you need is to get the general idea and tone of the passage and answer the questions as fast as you can. if you do this well, you can definitely bring your score up to a high twenty (possibly 28-29) or higher if you REALLY make drastic improvements. </p>
<p>good luck!!</p>
<p>Thanks guys… really good tips! And yes, those scores were official. Pretty crazy, I thought that out of the 4 sections, English and reading were the most alike, and I had a 9 point difference in those scores alone!</p>