How to write the act essay

Important: If you haven't read these two other ACT Writing guides before, take a minute and read them now: This will make the rest of the article make more sense.

Planning is an essential tool that is often overlooked when writing ACT essays. From our experience, it is something that should be done at the onset of writing. It becomes cumbersome to plan as you write; making you take even longer to write your work. It may seem unnecessary at the mention of it, however, the impact it has is immense.

Because the whole essay must be written in 40 minutes, getting a 12 requires some luck. You have to pick a thesis and think of relevant and convincing evidence to support it before you can even start writing, so a lot depends on how quickly you can decided on a point of view and relevant support for whatever the prompt happens to be.

This sample prompt, Intelligent Machines, is representative of the prompts that will be used for the ACT writing test. The test describes an issue and provides three different perspectives on the issue.