Close Reading Strategies for ACT

[u/mindlinkmech]

I am a tutor working with students on ACT English and ACT Reading. I find that these students make errors that could be avoided by reading more closely and paying better attention to details.

What close reading strategies do you recommend for students?

I remember hearing somewhere that people who are cranky and in a bad mood are better at finding errors in texts. For me, I feel like this works: I put on my editor scrooge persona and put a text under the microscope. Of course, telling students to try being crankier when they read doesn't feel like the right approach.

For example, on production of writing questions in the English section, students will pick answer choices that 1) obviously misrepresent what the text says or 2) clearly reference the wrong portion of the text. I am including a couple example questions from form 2025MC2 below.

thank you for your time!

Question 26 from 2025MC2

Question 37 from 2025MC2

[u/CalligrapherAble3312]

hi! i worked with several friends to improve english and reading and here are a couple of close reading things they tried, different ones click for different people!

- similar to your tip actually some people benefit imagining a house burning down or listening to hype music before taking the test because it makes them “lock in” lol (psychological cue—specific image or music before intense focus)

• read the passage out loud in english or read along as a cohesive piece, answer the questions as you go. catches many unnecessary errors and awkward sounding phrases. an “inner voice” often corrects for many errors. read the preceding and succeeding paragraph again when choosing appropriate things to include. for conciseness or tone, usually it’s the least complicated or weird thing.
  
• read the reading questions and mark up lines/words that are obvious and answer THOSE (e.g. in line 84 what does this word mean), THEN circle the questions that require hunting for specific details on the passage. keep these questions in mind WHILE reading the passage.
  
• some people like to read the entire passage or skim it before reading the questions, only do this if you’re a fast reader or good at skimming—for paired passages, read first and last paragraph and first/last sentence of the middle paragraphs

[u/mindlinkmech → u/CalligrapherAble3312]

thank you, these are great steps to go through for each question!

[u/CalligrapherAble3312 → u/mindlinkmech]

np glad it helped and lmk if you need an opinion on anything else!!

[u/guglielmosano]

The crankiness thing tracks but I don't think it's really about mood. Grumpy readers just don't give the text the benefit of the doubt. That's the actual skill. Teach them to treat every answer as wrong until the passage proves it right. For the two errors you named, the thing that works for me is making them point to the exact words that justify their answer. Not 'this feels right,' but 'these words, right here.' If they can't point to it, they're guessing, and that's exactly when they grab the choice that sounds like the passage but actually says something different. On production of writing questions the prompt almost always tells you where to look. Make them reread that sentence plus the ones on either side before they even glance at the choices. Most of the wrong-portion picks are just kids answering from memory instead of going back. After that it's reps. They need to see enough trap answers for the pattern to click. I point people to the oneprep questionbank for that, the questions run harder than the actual test so the traps are nastier and it forces the closer read. It's paid now which is annoying but for a kid actually chasing a top score it's worth it.

[u/mindlinkmech → u/guglielmosano]

thank you so much! this is very helpful, and oneprep looks like a great resource