Read for Comprehension

How can I learn to read well? 

Speedy but thorough: 

Yes, you need to go fast, but you get no points for merely getting to the end if you didn't understand anything. You need a balance of truly comprehending and finishing on time. This means you need to encode.

Read this sentence:

When my family first moved to the United States, my father was still traveling back and forth to Iran before joining us permanently.

This was taken from the April 2022 E25 exam. When you read it, did you imagine in your mind?

1: Who the character is?

2: Why the father might be traveling back and forth? Was he maybe in the military?

If not, then you need to start encoding what you read. Good readers ask questions constantly, that's how they make sense of the passage. Remember, you get no points for merely getting to the end of a passage or for reading that sentence quickly. You get points for knowing what the sentence is saying.

Drill: One effective strategy we have used with our students for improving reading comprehension is to have them read a practice Reading passage and then write a sentence about the tone and main idea of the passage at the top of the questions page. After writing these sentences, we instruct students not to go back to any part of the passage, even for questions that reference specific line numbers and rely solely on their memory and the tone and main idea sentences they have written. This drill helps students practice reading for comprehension and avoid the tendency to go back to the passage unnecessarily. While we don't recommend this strategy for the actual ACT test, it can be a helpful tool for improving comprehension skills.