The ACT is coming up and getting a good writing score is critical to your college future (as if you didn’t already know that). In general, standardized tests like the ACT have two main writing challenges that you should prepare for:
- Timed essay
- Unpredictable question topic
When you look at these challenges together, they seem daunting, but keep reading. We’ll help you manage each element and explain how you can prepare for both the timing and unpredictability when completing the ACT essay section.
Plan your ACT Essay
Let’s start with the timed writing element. Your ACT essay must be written in 40 minutes. This means you’ll have to organize your answer and produce a good essay quickly. The process starts by knowing exactly how to outline your ideas.
Second, you can’t predict what the question will be. It’s bad enough that you don’t have much time to organize and write, but having to do that in response to a surprise question makes the writing portion of the test even more challenging.
Keep Calm Under Pressure
It’s easy to get stressed out about the writing portion of the test, but there are a few hints that can keep you organized and give you the confidence you need to do well on the writing test.
- Review the rules. To prepare for the writing portion of the exam, it’s helpful to review the rules. You can find out exactly how your essay will be scored on the ACT website. When graders take a look at your writing, these rules will determine your score.
- Get organized. Because you know how your essay is going to be scored, you can prepare yourself to organize your thoughts in a way that will ensure your paper meets the stated expectations for a good essay. The best part about this approach: it’s really easy to get your brain ready to organize your ideas quickly no matter what question you encounter on the actual test.
Understand ACT Essay Scoring
There are four key areas that will be used to score your essay:
- Ideas and Analysis
- Development and Support
- Organization
- Language Use
Here’s what each of those categories means:
- Ideas and Analysis: This includes a thesis statement, context for your essay, and analysis.
- Development and support: The key things you need in this category are evidence and/or examples in your body paragraphs. You must connect that supporting evidence to the point you are making.
- Organization: Be sure you have a thesis statement in your introduction, clear topic sentences in your body paragraphs, and a summary of your argument in your conclusion.
- Language Use: Language use means that you avoid spelling and grammar mistakes, vary your sentence length, and use language that is appropriate for an academic essay.
When your essay is scored, the grader looks at each of these categories to evaluate how well you did for each. You know the rules. Now you just have to prepare yourself to make sure you
follow the rules in line with the expectations for a good score.
Following the rules is not only easy; it also gives you confidence that you can write an essay in a limited amount of time on a topic you won’t know until you see it. Each of these categories
corresponds to standard elements of a good essay outline, so the first thing to study as you prepare for your ACT exam is to make sure you know what each of these things are.
If you’re not sure where to begin, or you need to review in more detail how to follow these rules, check out our previous post for tips and videos on how to quickly write a good essay.
Practice your Essay!
Once you’ve studied up on what the rules are for writing a good essay on the ACT, you should write a few practice essays. ACT gives you six free practice questions.
With your practice questions in hand, it’s time to write. Ecree, a writing software aimed at providing real-time feedback as you write, lets you create a free trial account. You can write or
upload an essay into the system and get instant feedback on your essay using the same characteristics the ACT uses to score your writing.
