Tips to improve my ACT English score

I got a 30 on my ACT but only a 27 on my English section and I can never seem to figure out why I’m so bad at it. I’ve bought prep books and multiple English practice tests but I can never seem to raise my score. Even some of my friends who get low 20s on their ACT still get a 30+ in the English section. Does anyone have important tips that could help me raise my score?

Had the same problem. I was scoring in the 26s on English then raised my score to a 34 on my official. All you really can do is study the rules and practice. There is no way around the English section but I did notice when I stopped second guessing myself my score went higher. Try that. Good Luck and continue studying.

Thanks

There is plenty you can do. The first thing is to go over your past tests and find out what you are messing up on – is it the grammar? Is it the questions that ask about the passage/argument as a whole?

For grammar, you should find out exactly which skills you are messing up on – commas, word choice, etc. If you can narrow your mistakes down to a few things here, then go online and figure out how to use them (for example, if you mostly mess up on commas, look up how to use commas). On the other hand, for the general questions about the argument/passage, focus on how to determine what the author is trying to say and how to answer based on this (these questions are typically harder – I don’t really know tricks for this, except to practice).

The most important thing to do is to narrow down your weaknesses. It is almost pointless to do practice test after practice test if there are only a few skills you need to work on (which is likely the case with a 27). It’s like studying for a math test – you wouldn’t spend the same amount of time studying the problems you understand as you would studying the problems you don’t understand.

Also, shorter is always better! The ACT loves conciseness. If out of the 4 options to change a phrase there is one with the least amount of words, look at that answer first, plug it into the sentence where the underline is, and if it works, you are almost always right.

Good luck!

^Shorter is USUALLY better. For example, the ACT has used questions in which a pronoun lacks an antecedents and should be replaced with a longer non-pronoun group of words.

Yes, @CHD2013 is definitely right about that. Just be certain to avoid repetitive statements. A lot of the time they have two synonyms to describe the same noun – like internationally and globally. Or they throw in an unnecessary “of” and jumble up the words in an odd way.

Another thing to consider is that there are questions where shorter is NOT better. These are questions that ask you to choose a replacement that brings out a specific meaning, where the length of the replacement is typically irrelevant.