Maximize Your ACT English Score-Certified Teacher/Experienced ACT Tutor (1-On-1)

I am kind, patient, creative, flexible, and empathetic. I am also hilarious, and my (spurious) data shows that students who laugh at my jokes score 10-72% better on the test. (I made that up, but I'm usually very honest.) 

I've worked with many students with ADHD, ASD, dyslexia, processing disorders, and other learning differences. While I don't teach students to decode words in these sessions, I do work on writing/English strategies that students need for the test and for college writing in general. Students report that applying what they learned with me about punctuation, grammar, introductions, conclusions, and using transitions in classroom assignments with great success.

Because it's best to use official test questions to prepare, I highly recommend that students purchase The Official ACT Prep Guide 2024-2025 for use in sessions and for homework. 

In one-on-one ACT English sessions, we typically cover the following: 

Punctuation rules tested on the ACT.

Sentence-level grammar: (noun/pronoun agreement and clarity, noun/verb agreement and verb tenses, parallelism, misplaced modifiers)

The "Red Flag Trio: parallelism, misplaced modifiers, wordiness/redundancy. These are the concepts that studenffts often fail to notice in ACT passages, so they believe the sentence is free from errors.

Word Choice-words in context, tone, adjectives/adverbs, who/whom/that/which/when/where, idiomatic expressions, etc. 

Student-As-Editor- 
"Which choice best concludes the paragraph using information from the first sentence?"
"The author is thinking of adding this true sentence at point B in the passage. Should he?"
"Which is the best order for the following sentences?"
"The author's goal was to write an essay describing how... . Did he meet this goal?"
"If the author deleted this sentence: _____, what would the passage lose?" 

We also work on strategies for reading the question carefully--identifying the question type, how to avoid skipping important words, the difference between relevant and irrelevant ideas, avoiding traps. 

Selecting the best answer--predicting the answer, finding a match, identifying and eliminating trap answers, using process of elimination, knowing when to guess and move on.

Pacing--although the goal is scoring as many points as possible, students want to answer all the questions. We'll work on which questions eat up too much time and should be answered last if time remains. 

Instruction consists of teacher-made instructional material including slide presentations and questions from The Official ACT Prep Guide. 

In order to see a score increase, it's essential that students not only attend sessions but also complete homework, take practice tests, and, if necessary, study vocabulary outside of sessions. I offer Vocabulady's SAT Vocab Game Night classes on Outschool to help with this. They're fun and effective. I recommend Level A for the ACT. 

Because the sessions are one-on-one, we'll cover whichever English questions the practice test identifies as priorities (taking into account how frequently the question type appears on the test). We'll also discuss how to read the different types of passages, what kind of notes to take, and how to avoid trap answers.

Additionally, I highly recommend that students purchase this book for homework practice: The Critical Reader: The Complete Guide to ACT Grammar by Erica L. Meltzer. It has a lot of practice for each question type.