The Content of the English Test
There are actually two types of content on the English
Test: the content of the passages and the content of the questions.
Question content is the more important of the two.
When we say “the content of the passages,” we mean the
subjects covered by the five English Test passages. The passages
usually cover a variety of subjects, ranging from historical discussions
to personal narratives. Don’t worry about passage content for now;
it is important when answering certain Rhetorical Skills questions,
which we’ll discuss toward the end of this chapter, but the grammar
of the passage is generally more important.
“The content of the questions” refers to the two kinds
of material covered by the English Test: Usage/Mechanics and Rhetorical
Skills. The majority of this section is devoted to explaining the
question content on the English Test. For now, we’ll give you a
brief summary of the material.
The 40 Usage/Mechanics questions on the test
deal with the proper use of standard written English. You can think
of them as the “technical” aspect of the test because they ask you
to apply the rules of standard English to sections of the passages.
Questions covering usage and mechanics are almost always presented
as underlined sections of the passages. Usage/Mechanics questions
test your understanding of the following categories:
Punctuation (10 questions): Punctuation
questions ask you to identify and correct any misplaced, misused,
or missing punctuation marks. The punctuation marks most commonly
tested on the ACT are, in order of decreasing frequency, commas,
apostrophes, colons, and semicolons.
Grammar and Usage (12 questions): Basic Grammar
and Usage questions usually target a single incorrect word that
violates the conventional rules of English grammar. These questions
frequently test your knowledge of agreement issues and pronoun and
verb forms and cases.
Structure (18 questions): Sentence Structure questions tend
to deal with the sentence as a whole. They test you on clause relationships, parallelism,
and placement of modifiers.
If some of these Usage/Mechanics issues sound unfamiliar
or confusing to you, don’t worry—later, in the “Usage/Mechanics
Questions on the English Test” chapter, we’ll review all of the
material you need to know for these questions.
Rhetorical Skills Questions
The 35 Rhetorical Skills questions test your
ability to refine written English. If the Usage/Mechanics
questions are the technical aspect of the test, then the Rhetorical
Skills questions are the intuitive aspect—but they require an intuition
you can develop through practice. The boxes you encounter on the
test will deal with Rhetorical Skills questions; some underlined
sections may deal with Rhetorical Skills as well.
Rhetorical Skills questions break down into the following
Writing Strategy (12 questions): Writing
Strategy questions are concerned with a passage’s effectiveness.
These questions require that you understand the point, purpose,
and tone of a passage. When answering these questions, you must
decide the best way to support a point with evidence, to introduce and
conclude paragraphs, to make a transition between paragraphs, or
to phrase a statement.
(11 questions): Organization questions can deal with individual sentences,
individual paragraphs, or the passage as a whole. They will ask you
either to restructure the passage or paragraph or to decide on the
best placement of a word or phrase within a sentence.
(12 questions): Style questions focus on effective word choice.
They will ask you to eliminate redundancy and to select the most
appropriate word or phrase. In order to answer style questions correctly,
you need to understand the tone of a passage, and you need to have
a good eye for clear written English.
Because Rhetorical Skills questions require a sense of
good English writing, they tend to be more difficult than Usage/Mechanics
questions, which primarily require that you understand grammatical
rules. This sense for good writing can be developed through review
and practice. You’ll have a chance for both in the “Rhetorical Skills
Questions on the English Test” chapter.
Memorization and the Content of the English Test
The ACT writers emphasize that the English Test is not
a test of memorization. It would be more accurate to say that the
test does not explicitly test your memorization
of rules of the English language.
You will not be tested on vocabulary on the English Test
(unlike on the SAT Verbal, which is largely a vocabulary memorization
test), but having a decent vocabulary is important in answering
style and strategy questions. The questions often ask you to choose
the most effective word or phrase. If you don’t know what some of
the words mean, you may not be able to make the right choice.
Technically, the test does not ask you to memorize grammar
rules, but it should be obvious that doing well on the test requires
that you know the conventional rules of grammar. You won’t be asked
to state the definition of a gerund, but you’ll be in trouble if
you can’t make your subjects and verbs agree or if you think a comma
splice is something tasty in your spice rack.
Obviously, you need to understand grammatical rules for
the English Test. While knowing these rules does not explicitly
require memorization, most people begin to learn grammar by memorizing