Even though the ACT is a standardized test, the English section can feel like a foreign language to many students. It’s crucial to help narrow this section's focus to improve performance on the test and help students boost their overall ACT scores. This blog discusses ACT Grammar Practice to help students improve ACT scores and relieve test-day anxiety. Targeted grammar practice can help your students identify, understand, and apply the rules of English for the ACT. Effective teaching strategies will help your students with both this practice and the test itself so they can achieve their desired scores. We will touch upon improving grammer and how to teach essay writing to students.
One solution to help improve your students’ grammar skills is EssayGrader, a grading software for teachers that quickly grades essays while providing feedback on grammar, punctuation, organization, and more. The program’s targeted approach relieves teachers and students of the stress often accompanying writing assignments.
What’s Actually Tested on the ACT English Section?
In order to excel on the English section of the ACT, you first need to understand how it's organized—if you're not yet clear on that, take a look at our post laying out exactly what's tested on the ACT English. Once you know the basics of how this section of the test work, you just have to learn how to approach it. Do that, and you’ll find that the English section is surprisingly simple! There are five key points you need to understand about the ACT English:
1. ACT English Isn't the Same as High School English
Even students who excel with writing and grammar in school can struggle with the ACT English because the test has its own logic. The ACT will sometimes consider sentences that would be fine with your English teacher wrong, while some of the correct constructions on the test would make your teacher cringe.
2. The Rules for ACT English May Be Weird, but There Aren't That Many of Them
Luckily, the types of questions on the ACT English are minimal, making this test section surprisingly easy to study for. These questions fall into two categories:
The ACTs concepts in context, so it's less important to know the names of terms of the reason behind rules than to understand how to spot and correct errors.
3. Always Have a Plan
Every good strategy shares one vital principle: you must always read to the end no matter where the underlined section appears in a sentence. If you don't do this, it will hurt your score—a lot.
4. Use the Structure of the Test to Your Advantage
Once you master your approach to the passages, you must learn how the ACT English questions work. The best way is to look at, practice with, and analyze as many real ACT questions as possible. Remember that the test is multiple choice and consider how you can use that to your advantage.
5. Don't Rush!
Many students make many careless mistakes because they rush to get through the test and then end up with time left over at the end. If you have more than one or two minutes left at the end of the English section and are missing more than a handful of questions, you're moving too fast.
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20 ACT Grammar Practice Test Questions & Tips
ACT grammar questions focus on the standard written English that people use in everyday writing. In addition to testing your knowledge of grammar rules and writing style, the ACT also measures your ability to make sentences clear and concise and improve the overall organization of a short passage.
1. A Complete Sentence Needs a Subject and a Predicate
A complete sentence has two components: a subject and a predicate.
In the sentence “Susie loves fancy snacks,” Susie is the subject (who or what the sentence is about) and loves fancy snacks is the predicate (a phrase that has a verb and a complete thought).
2: A Comma Splice Improperly Combines One or More Independent Clauses
A run-on sentence is when a sentence has too many independent clauses that aren’t combined properly. Students frequently make the mistake of attempting to combine run-on sentences with a comma, resulting in a grammatical error known as the comma splice.
The following is an example of a comma splice: I run five miles along the river on Saturdays, even when it’s raining.
3: Check for subject-verb agreement for Present Tense and “To Be” Verbs
Knowing subject-verb agreement rules, which refers to whether or not the subject matches the corresponding verb, are some of the most useful grammar rules for the ACT. In grammar, there are five types of subjects:
- First-person singular (I)
- Second-person singular or plural (you)
- Third-person (or inanimate object) singular (he/she/it)
- First-person plural (we)
- Third-person (or inanimate object) plural (they)
4: Modals Are Helping Verbs that Define the Mood of Regular Verbs
Modals are words (auxiliary verbs, also known as helping verbs) that appear before verbs in sentences. These words include:
- Can
- Should
- Would
- Could
- May
- Might, etc.
The purpose of modals is to add a subtle distinction to the tone, intent, or purpose of a piece of writing.
5: English Has Six Basic Tenses
Two elements comprise the six basic tenses: the tense itself (whether an action happens in the past, present, or future) and the aspect (how an action relates to different aspects of time). The two main aspects are:
- Simple (the focus is on when a singular action is, was, or will be completed)
- Perfect (the focus is on when an action is connected to more than one time period OR when the action happening is secondary to the action itself).
6: English Has Six Progressive Tenses
Progressive tenses describe continuous actions that happen in the past, present, or future. Like basic tenses, they also have simple and perfect aspects.
- Past progressive
- Present progressive
- Future progressive
- Past perfect progressive
- Present perfect progressive
- Future perfect progressive
7: Watch Out for Subjects that Come After the Verb
Subject-verb agreement questions on the ACT also try to confuse you with sentences in which the subject comes after the verb. This is called subject-verb inversion.
For example, in the sentence… Under the lamppost stood a mysterious man. …the subject “mysterious man” comes after the verb “stood.”
Subject-verb inversions can be particularly tough. When you see a sentence like this, your mental ear cannot hear the correct subject before you get to the verb because you haven’t even read it yet.
8: Verb Tenses in a Passage Should Be Consistent
Unless there is a specific reason to change the tenses of verbs in a passage (such as a shift from describing past events to describing present or future ones), verb tense should be the same across a passage.
9: A Pronoun Must Always Match its Antecedent
An antecedent refers to the subject(s) or object(s) the pronoun replaces in the sentence/paragraph.
10: Watch Out for Ambiguous Pronouns
Sentences with two or more antecedents run the risk of having ambiguous pronouns.
For example: Mark met Steve after he had dinner. Though the writer might know that Mark was the person who had dinner, the reader would have no idea.
Here’s the correct way to write the sentence: Mark met Steve after Mark had dinner.
11: Coordinating Conjunctions Join Equally Important Clauses
Coordinating conjunctions describes how two equally important clauses relate to one another. Coordinating conjunctions are also used right before the last item in a list (notice how a comma is used before the conjunction): My favorite things to do at camp are hiking, swimming, and sailing.
12: Subordinating Conjunctions Join Clauses Where One Clause is the Most Important
Subordinating conjunctions are used when a sentence has at least one independent clause and one or more additional clauses that enhance the main clause. These clauses can be independent or dependent.
13: Make Sure That All Items in a List Are Equal
Do you see anything wrong with the below sentence? For breakfast, I like to eat cereal, fruit, and I also like yogurt. “Yogurt” is getting a little extra love there; grammatically speaking, that’s a no-no.
To correct the parallel structure, we need to get rid of the stuff in front of “yogurt” so we just have a list of three nouns: For breakfast, I like to eat cereal, fruit, and yogurt.
14: Make Sure the Right Things Are Being Compared in a Sentence
Comparisons are among the trickier parallelism questions tested on the ACT. But once you realize how ridiculous comparison parallelism errors sound to the ear, you can spot them easily.
15: Isolate Each Phrase in Prepositional Phrases to Ensure Parallelism
Sometimes, even trickier parallel structure questions involve prepositional phrases, which are—you guessed it!—words that contain a preposition. To answer these questions well, you need to review idioms on the ACT, which covers common prepositional phrases.
16: Misplaced Modifiers Describe the Wrong Part of the Sentence
Do you see anything funny in the following sentence? I don’t get how my sister can walk our dog in heels. While you may automatically assume that my sister is wearing the heels, the sentence makes it seem like the dog is. Although this is a delightful mental image, we should eliminate confusion about who is wearing the heel.
17: Dangling Modifiers Don’t Modify Anything in The Sentence
While a misplaced modifier seems to fit the word or phrase, it’s modifying—even though it’s incorrectly placed—dangling modifiers are missing an appropriate word or phrase altogether. Dangling modifiers are easier to catch because they sound off to the ear.
18: Most of the Time, Appositives Are Set Off with Commas
In these scenarios, appositives introduce extra information that is helpful but not essential to the sentence. This means you can lift whatever is set off with commas out of the sentence, and it should still read as a sentence.
19: Essential Appositives Are Not Set Off with Commas
This is a trickier scenario that the ACT might test. You can try the “lift it out of the sentence” test to see if taking an appositive out creates an error.
20: Don’t Put a Comma Before or After a Preposition On the ACT
It’s always incorrect to put a comma after a preposition and very rarely correct to place one before.
Here is an example sentences that include commas incorrectly placed before or after prepositions:
Ana enjoys traveling, to Hawaii for fun. Lucy was petrified to look under, the bed.
The commas before "to" and after "under" should be removed.
Here is the corrected versions of the sentences:
Ana enjoys traveling to Hawaii for fun. Lucy was petrified to look under the bed.
The one exception to this rule is when a preposition introduces a non-restrictive clause.
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