In high school, I had a history teacher who was known for going off on tangents—he would start giving us his lesson on the French Revolution but end up telling us all about the Peregrine falcon. These facts were interesting, but they were hardly relevant to the issue at hand (how Marie Antoinette got her head chopped off). 

Transitions are one of the most common and trickiest rhetorical topics tested on the ACT English section. However, there are a couple simple rules that can make answering these questions much easier.

In this post, I'll cover everything you need to know to approach all three types of transition question:

• Types of transitional relationships
• Transitions between sentences
• Transitions between clauses
• Transitions between paragraphs
• Key strategies for transitions on ACT English questions

Over the past five years, I've tutored dozens of students on the ACT and seen them miss the same types of questions over and over again. The ACT English section really only tests a handful of concepts, so it's easy to make the same exact mistake on three or four questions—which really hurts your score.

Don't worry, though! I've come up with eight simple rules you can follow to help you avoid the most common problems on the ACT English and automatically raise your score 1-2 points. Use my ACT English strategies and practice on a lot of realistic questions, and you'll raise your English score.

You may not have heard of relative pronouns, but we use them everyday. “Who,” “which,” “that,” where,” and “when” are all examples of relative pronouns.

Though the name may make it seem like these words have something to do with your great uncle Cecil, they actually introduce related information that describes a noun. 

Relative pronouns tend to inspire a lot of confusion. Is it the boy who cried wolf or the boy whom cried wolf? All's well that ends well or all's well which ends well?

As much as we may think we need the fancier pronouns, like whom and which, more often than not, the ones we're more familiar with are just fine. In both of those cases, the first version of the saying is the correct one.

One of comedian Groucho Marx's most famous jokes involves a pachyderm and some sleepwear.

"One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas," he says. "How he got in my pajamas I don't know!"

This joke is a play on a grammatical error called a misplaced modifier, where a descriptive phrase or word is placed in the wrong part of the sentence.

The modifier errors on the SAT Writing may not be quite as funny as Groucho's, but it's still important that you understand how they work. To that end, we'll be covering both basic grammatical concepts behind faulty modifiers and how to apply that knowledge on the test:

Oftentimes, if I make an outlandish comparison, someone will turn to me and say, "You can't compare apples and oranges, Alex."

Grammatically speaking, however, you absolutely can compare apples and oranges—they're both fruits! However, it's true that some comparisons are nonsensical, like a comparison between apples and eating apples.

This kind of construction is called an illogical comparison, and it's one of the most unusual concepts on SAT Writing. Though essentially simple to spot, illogical comparisons are unfamiliar for most students because they rarely come up elsewhere. 

The format of the ACT English is pretty weird and unusual, compared to most of your high school English tests. If you want to succeed on this section, you have to know how to approach its unique passage-based structure.

"And how," you ask, "do I do that?" Always, always, have a plan.  

In this guide, I'll show you the best way to read and answer ACT english questions when you attack the passage. These strategies come from my experience working personally with nearly a hundred students. You should apply them in your own ACT English practice to help you prepare thoroughly for test day.

One of comedian Groucho Marx's most famous jokes involves a pachyderm and some sleepwear.

"One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas," he says. "How he got in my pajamas I don't know!"

This joke is a play on a grammatical error called a misplaced modifier. 

The modifier errors on the ACT English may not be quite as funny as Groucho's, but you still have to understand how they work. To that end, we'll be covering both the basic grammatical concepts behind faulty modifiers and how to apply that knowledge on the test:

What's the difference between a period and a semicolon? Between a comma and a dash? These questions bedevil not just students, but even professional writers. Punctuation can be one of the weirdest, most confusing parts of writing.

However, the ACT English section isn't writing—it's a multiple choice test, which means that every question has to have only one correct answer. The ACT tests a specific set of punctuation rules, most of which deal with commas. I covered commas in a separate post—here I'll be explaining the other punctuation rules you need to know, which deal with apostrophes, semicolons, colons, and dashes.

Pronoun agreement errors are some of the most common on the SAT Reading & Writing section, and they can be confusing because people often misuse pronouns, especially when we speak. In fact, I just made a pronoun mistake: can you spot it?

Take a closer look at the second half of my first sentence: "people often misuse pronouns, especially when we speak." Who is "we" referring to here: "people." However, the correct pronoun for the third person plural is they. The correct version is "people often misuse pronouns, especially when they speak."

On SAT Reading & Writing, you'll be expected to spot many such errors. We'll be covering both the basic SAT writing rules regarding pronouns you need to know and the common mistakes you'll see on the test:

The ACT English can be overwhelming. There are so many questions! And they're mostly just underlined text: what are they even asking? Of course, that confusion is the whole point: it's what makes this part of the test hard. 

What does that mean for you? Because the ACT test writers rely on your confusion about the format to confuse you, the questions themselves usually aren't that difficult.