Editor’s Note: the article that is following a guest post by Kristin at Magoosh.


Prepping for the ACT and determined to achieve the highest score possible? With a little help from useful tools and resources like an ACT study guide, it is possible to. But they are you enthusiastic about raising your essay that is ACT score particular? Well, you are in luck, because in this post we review the most effective two strategies for an essay that is going to knock the socks from the graders.

To accomplish this, you will need to understand that your graders are human beings. They truly are reading a significant load of essays. And a complete lot of them begin to sound alike. So you really need to do is write a clear, argumentative thesis, address all three of the required perspectives, include good examples, and have a coherent structure if you are shooting for a good score on the essay, all.

But you need to stand out from the crowd if you want a GREAT score. Here is how can be done it:

Use less obvious examples in your ACT essay.

A lot of students wrote about the civil rights movement on the first new essay. It absolutely was an obvious example that a lot of students had studied, and it was certainly the very first thing that jumped to my http://essaytyperonline.com mind as well. Now, technically, graders are not supposed to be punishing you for an unoriginal example as long it well as you do. But remember the golden rule: write for a human reader! If a grader reads 50 essays about the civil rights movement in a row after which extends to yours and you are clearly writing about something totally different, the grader is going to sit up and take notice. Not only this, however it will also be more challenging to compare your essay to others. As you, but others will do it better if you write about the same topic as everyone else, it is likely that some people won’t do it as well. So try not to open you to ultimately these comparisons. Be original.

Again, this doesn’t mean which you can not write on a typical topic, however if you will do it, make sure you pick very specific examples within that topic to demonstrate your understanding. However if you are able to think about a thing that will be less obvious, go that route.

select the option to provide your own perspective on the ACT essay, but only switch it up slightly.

Now, this will be tricky. You will get an amazing score by simply completely agreeing with one of the three presented perspectives, and also for the vast majority of students, this is the best course of action to make sure you don’t go completely off track and wind up hurting your score. However, if you consider you to ultimately be an extremely strong writer, you are able to truly impress with the addition of your personal twist in the prompt. More often than not, the easiest method to do this is always to narrow the scope of 1 of this perspectives. For instance, if you appear at sample essay #5 on act.org, you’ll see that the graders applauded the student for evaluating the perspectives through the “lens of a ideology that is particular: capitalism. Here is an excerpt associated with the score explanation:

The prompt is about a larger issue—the positive or negative impact of “intelligent machines” inside our society—but this student has narrowed the scope and, in doing this, surely could provide a specific compelling argument that didn’t you will need to address all areas of life in a essay that is five-paragraph.

So for you ACT-writing superstars out there who are interested in a score into the 11–12 range, take these key ideas to heart, and acquire practicing with ACT writing prompts. The new ACT essay prompt is tough, but practicing with sample prompts and coming up with arguments from the fly can help! Practice the essay by itself, and then graduate to an ACT Practice Test to simulate the experience that is test-day.

Kristin makes sure Magoosh’s sites are high in awesome, free resources which can be found by students prepping for standardized tests. With a PhD from UC Irvine and degrees in Education and English, she’s been working in education since 2004 and contains helped students prepare for standardized tests, along with college and school that is graduate, since 2007. She enjoys the agony and bliss of trail running, backpacking, hot yoga, and esoteric knowledge.

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