ACT: English

Grammar, punctuation, and rhetoric under the clock

The ACT English Test is 75 questions in 45 minutes — five passages, an average of 36 seconds per item, and a scoring key that rewards the writer who is clear, correct, and concise. This epoch builds that skill from the ground up: the four jobs of the comma, the semicolon-colon-dash-apostrophe family, subject-verb agreement and pronoun case, verbs and modifiers and idioms, the run-on/splice/fragment triad, and then the rhetoric half of the test — topic development, organization and transitions, word choice and tone, and the strategy that ties it together (NO CHANGE, the shortest correct answer, and pacing). Learn the rules the test actually tests, and 45 minutes stops being a race.