The Best ACT Reading® Strategies: Tried and Tested

What are the best strategies for the Reading on the ACT® Test? I’m an expert tutor with nearly a decade of experience helping high school students reach their dreams and increase their standardized test scores. These are the strategies I’ve proven have helped my students on the Reading Test.

I’ll give you an overview of these techniques, then show you an example.

Passage Order

Some passages on the ACT® Reading Test are easier for most students. You do not need to solve the passages in order. You can start on the Natural Science, which usually has the most line reference questions, and is therefore usually the easiest passage for most students. Don’t take more than 15 seconds to decide the order you’ll do the passages in.

For most students, the passage order is:

1. Natural Science
2. Humanities / Social Science
3. Literary Narrative

Question Order

You also don’t need to solve all of the questions in order. Most times, it is a very bad idea to do so. The first question on any given passage is usually a main idea question. Most students struggle to answer a main idea question before having done all of the other questions first. So don’t.

Start with the questions that are easiest to answer. Then work your way through the questions. You’re looking for line reference questions. Not all line reference questions are easy, but most are.

You need to read enough context to answer the question for yourself first, then go back to the question to find out which answer choice matches your answer. Usually this means reading a sentence previous and a sentence after, but it can require more reading.

Don’t try to look at all of the answer choices and then find an answer choice in the text. Not only will you get confused trying to carry around 4 possible answer choices in your head while reading, you’ll also likely fall victim to one of the ACT® Reading Test’s tricks. They can make almost any answer choice sound right if you don’t know the definitive right answer choice.

Then when you do have enough context to answer the question, make sure that the answer choice is 100% correct. A lot of answer choices will be ¾ correct. Then the last ¼ of the answer choice totally changes the answer choice entirely. A lot of students don’t read to the end of an answer choice, and thus lose points. Remember only ¾ correct is still 100% wrong.

Once you’ve solved the line reference questions, start working on the either paragraph references or specific references. Once those are solved, finally go on to the main idea questions. They should be a lot easier now.

Remember to answer all of the questions in a given passage before moving on. The point of answer questions in an order that suits a student is to build your knowledge on a given passage. That way you know which main idea question makes sense based on everything you’ve just read several times. When you move on to the next passage, you forget a lot of what was on a previous passage. So make sure all 10 questions are answered before moving on.

Skimming & Scanning

These are important reading skills not every student has developed. Sometimes students return to the text of find an answer – and they start reading the passage intently. In the beginning, I’d recommend most students actually read the passage, since most will have time. Then when you’re going back to solve the questions, you should be reading intently less and skimming and scanning more.

Scanning is helpful when the question has given you a specific word you can scan through the text to find. The word might be a synonym. So you’ll have to use your discretion to glance around the different words in search of a specific word or phrase.

Skimming is pulling your eyes across the text to get a general idea for what’s going on. Sometimes, a question will ask when a certain event happened or when an idea formed. It’s hard to know exactly, so you skim the text to see generally where that idea is being talked about. Then when you find that area, you can read it intently. This saves you time from having to read the whole passage intently for every question.

Here’s an example passage. I’ll map how I’d do the questions. Note that you might start with a different passage than the Literary Narrative (Prose Fiction), such as Natural Science.

First Pass

1. 1- Main idea – skip.
2. 2- Specific idea reference. I’ll return.
3. 3- This looks like a line reference, but it’s actually more complicated than that. I might try it. I’ll either have to read the context to see what the narrator first “muses over” and then “rejects.” Or I can skip for now.
4. 4- Easy. Line reference. Done.
5. 5- Specific reference. Will come back.
6. 6- Easy word in context. Done.
7. 7- “in the context of the passage” reads like it’s verging on main idea. I’ll come back to it.
8. 8- Specific reference. Will do in a second.
9. 9- Word in context. Easy. Done.
10. 10- Paragraph reference. Kind of like a line reference. I’ll try it out. That wasn’t so bad! Done.

Now I have 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8 left. Still a lot, but I’m starting to understand the passage. Now I’m going to put in a little more hard work. I’ll take another pass quick.

1. 1- Main idea is going to be last. Skip for now.
2. 2- Okay, specific reference. Gotta do it. Need to scan for something about a photographer, a great photographer, then figure out what it inspired the narrator to do. Okay, found it. Now, what did it inspire the narrator to do? Okay got it. Done.
3. 3- Will do this one as above. Done.
4. 5- Specific reference to parents and their duties. You know what, I remember something about that from question 4. Let me try this. Oh yeah. Done.
5. 7- Main idea in context… I’ll try it. Okay, so I read the passage. I kind of understand what it’s doing in the passage? Let’s see how that matches up with the answer choices, eliminating any wrong answers. Oh, okay. Not so bad. Done.
6. 8- This one is just like the answer I gave in 5. So let me find the reference. Yup. Okay. Done.

Now I only have 1 left to do. It’s a main idea question.

1. 1- Passage as a whole? Oh okay, I got this. Yeah, no. That’s obvious. Done!

Conclusion

I hope that demonstration was helpful to you solving the ACT® Reading Test.