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

Prepping for the ACT and determined to attain the highest score possible? With a little assistance from useful tools and resources like an ACT study guide, you are able to. But they are you enthusiastic about raising your essay that is ACT score particular? Well, you’re in luck, because in this post we review the utmost effective two methods for an essay which will knock the socks off the graders.

To accomplish this, you ought to remember that your graders are human beings. They are reading lots and lots of essays. And a 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. Listed here is how you are able to do it:

Use less examples that are obvious your ACT essay.

A lot of students wrote about the civil rights movement on the first new essay. It had been an example that is obvious a lot of students had studied, and it was certainly the first thing that jumped to my mind as well. Now, technically, graders are not supposed to be punishing you for an unoriginal example as long as you do it well. But remember the golden rule: write for a human reader! Then gets to yours and you are writing about something totally different, the grader is going to sit up and pay attention if a grader reads 50 essays about the civil rights movement in a row and. Not just that, but it will also be more challenging to compare your essay to others. In the event that you come up with exactly the same topic as everyone else, chances are that many people will not get it done along with you, but others will do it better. So try not to open you to ultimately these comparisons. Be original.

Again, this doesn’t mean that you can not talk about a common topic, however if you will get it done, make sure you pick very specific examples within that topic to demonstrate your understanding. However if it is possible to think about a thing that could be less obvious, go that route.

pick the solution to provide your own perspective in the ACT essay, but only switch it up slightly.

Now, this can be tricky. You can get a perfect score by just 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 find yourself hurting your score. However, if you consider yourself to be a really strong writer, you might be able to truly impress with the addition of your very own twist in the prompt. More often than not, the easiest way to work on this would be to narrow the scope of just one for the perspectives. For example, if you look 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 particular ideology»: capitalism. Here’s an excerpt associated with the score explanation:

The prompt is approximately a bigger issue—the positive or negative impact of «intelligent machines» inside our society—but this student has narrowed the scope and, in doing this, was able to provide a specific compelling argument that didn’t try to address every area of life in a essay that is five-paragraph.

So for you ACT-writing superstars out there who are to locate a score in the 11–12 range, take these key ideas to heart, and get practicing with ACT writing prompts. The ACT that is new essay is tough, but practicing with sample prompts and picking out arguments from the fly can help! Practice the essay on its own, and then graduate to an ACT Practice Test to simulate the test-day experience.

Kristin makes sure Magoosh’s sites are high in awesome, free resources that may be found by students prepping for standardized tests. With a PhD from UC Irvine and degrees in Education and English, she is been involved in education since 2004 and has now helped students prepare for standardized tests, in addition to college and graduate school admissions, since 2007. She enjoys the agony and bliss of trail running, backpacking, hot yoga, and knowledge that is esoteric how to write a paper for college.