ACT English — whole-essay questions: purpose, paragraph order and placement

The last questions after an ACT English passage often step back from single sentences and ask about the essay as a whole. Suppose the writer's goal had been to explain a certain thing: would this essay do it? Where should Paragraph 2 go? If the writer adds a new paragraph, where does it belong? These questions cannot be answered from one sentence, and students who have practiced only on short paragraphs meet them unprepared.

Here each of the twelve questions prints a complete original four-paragraph essay, with numbered paragraphs, and asks one of those whole-essay questions. There are six essays: Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux's plan for Central Park, the Pony Express, the monarch butterfly's migration, a personal memoir of learning woodworking from a grandfather, a town that found a better way to recycle glass, and Andrew Carnegie's library grants. Each essay carries two questions of different types. Five ask whether the essay meets a stated goal and require choosing the right Yes or No and the right reason. Three ask where a paragraph should be placed, and in one of them the paragraph is already in the right place. Three ask where an added paragraph or sentence belongs, and one asks for the concluding sentence that returns to an earlier idea.

The explanations show how to decide: summarize the essay in one sentence before judging a goal; look for pointer words such as "those conditions" or "finally" that must follow what they point to; test a placement against both the paragraph before and the paragraph after.

The flashcards collect those methods and the traps, such as a reason that quotes a true detail but does not answer the goal.

The material offers a multiple-choice quiz and a deck of flashcards. These questions belong to Production of Writing, one of the three reporting categories of the English section. Zestly is an independent study tool; this practice material is not produced, affiliated with or endorsed by ACT, Inc., which owns the ACT.

  • Judge whether an essay fulfills a stated purpose and choose the reason that justifies the judgment
  • Reorder paragraphs using chronology, cause and effect, and pointer words
  • Place an added paragraph or sentence where it builds on what comes before and leads into what follows
  • Choose a concluding sentence that returns to an essay's main idea
  • Recognize when a paragraph is already in the most logical position

Practice material written by Zestly, based on the reporting categories in ACT's public description of the English section of the enhanced ACT (Production of Writing). Every sentence, essay, option and explanation is original; nothing is reproduced from any ACT publication or released test.

Sample question

The writer's essay, with numbered paragraphs: "[1] In the 1850s, New York City was growing so fast that some residents feared there would soon be no open land left on Manhattan. Newspaper editors and wealthy merchants began to argue that the city needed a great public park, one where people of every class could escape the noise of the streets. [2] In 1857 the city's park commissioners announced a public design competition. The winning entry, chosen in 1858 and called the Greensward Plan, came from Frederick Law Olmsted, a writer and farmer, and Calvert Vaux, an architect. [3] Olmsted and Vaux wanted visitors to forget they were in a city at all. Their plan sank the roads that carried crosstown traffic below the level of the park, so that carriages and wagons would not interrupt the meadows and woods above them. [4] Construction took years, and much of the "natural" landscape was built by hand: workers moved earth and rock, drained swamps, and planted thousands of trees and shrubs. The result looks so much like untouched countryside that many visitors today assume it always did." Suppose the writer's primary purpose had been to describe how a nineteenth-century public park was planned and built. Would this essay accomplish that purpose?

See the answer

Yes, because it traces the park from the demand for it, through the design competition, to its construction.

The four paragraphs follow the park's creation in order: the call for a park in the 1850s, the design competition and the winning plan, the designers' aims and their sunken roads, and the years of construction. That is exactly the stated purpose. The essay makes no comparison with other parks, says almost nothing about the designers' personal lives beyond their professions, and mentions today's visitors only in its final sentence.

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