To write a tasty ACT essay, you’ve got to know the necessary ingredients. The different grades of 1–6 are based on the quality of your essay in four fundamental categories:

ACT essay topics will address issues that pertain to high school students. A typical ACT topic will give you a statement that addresses ideas like dress codes, block scheduling, justice, the definition of success, or the importance of learning from mistakes. Though this list may sound overwhelming at first, the broadness of the topics means that with a little thought you can come up with plenty of examples to support your position on the topic.

Philosophers take years to write volumes on the topics of justice or success. On the ACT, you get 30 minutes. Given these time constraints, the key to writing a great ACT essay is taking a strong position on an extremely broad topic. A solid position requires you to employ two strategies:

Here’s a sample prompt with the directions you will find on the test:

Rephrase the prompt in your own words and make it more specific. If you rephrase the question:

you might come up with a sentence like:

Putting the ACT essay question in your own words makes it easier for you to take a position confidently since you’ll be proving your own statement, rather than the more obscure version put forth by the ACT.

Agree or disagree. When you choose an argument for a paper in school, you often have to strain yourself to look for something original, something subtle. Not here. Not on the 30-minute, fast food essay. Once you’ve rephrased the topic, agree or disagree with it. It’s that simple.

At this point, you may be thinking, “I could argue the ‘agree’ side pretty well, but I’m not sure that I totally believe in the agree side because . . .” Drop those thoughts. Remember, you’re not going to have a week to write this essay. You need to keep it simple. Agree or disagree, then come up with the examples that support your simple stand. And don’t take a position that straddles both sides of the issue.

To make an ACT essay really shine, you’ve got to include excellent examples. There are two things that make excellent ACT examples stand out from the crowd:

Strong examples discuss specific events, dates, or measurable changes over time. You must write about things that have happened in detail.

Let’s say you’re trying to come up with examples in support of the position that “Learning the lessons taught by failure is a sure route to success.” Perhaps you come up with the example of the American army during the Revolutionary War, which learned from its failures in the early years of the war how it needed to fight the British. Awesome! That’s a potentially great example. To make it actually great, though, you have to be able to say more than just, “The American army learned from its mistakes and then defeated the British Redcoats.” You need to be specific: Give dates, mention people, battles, tactics. If you use the experience of the American Army in the Revolutionary War as an example, you might mention the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783, which officially granted the Americans independence and gave the United States all lands east of the Mississippi river.

Don’t be intimidated if you can’t instantly recall the dates of pivotal historical events. Any descriptive details that you can provide will strengthen your argument, whether they are personal examples or historical facts. Just make sure to choose examples that you know a lot about in order to be specific. Knowing that the Americans defeated the British is the start of a great example, but you need to show specifically how the American victory answers the question, “In your opinion, can failure lead to success?” What failures on the part of the British government and army led to the Americans’ success? (Morale issues, leadership differences, inadequate soldiers and supplies, the Battle of Yorktown, and so on.) The one-two punch of a solid example and details that use the example to prove your argument make the difference between a good ACT example and a great one.

The other crucial thing about ACT essay examples is how much ground they cover. Sure, you could come up with three examples from your personal life about how you learned from failure. But you’re much more likely to impress the raters and write a better essay if you use a broad range of examples from different areas: history, art, politics, literature, and science, as well as your own life. That means when you’re thinking up examples, you should consider as wide a variety as possible, as long as all of your examples work to prove your argument.

To answer the question, “In your opinion, can failure lead to success?” you might choose one example from history, literature, and business or current events. Here are three examples that you might choose from those three areas:

A broad array of examples like those will provide a more solid and defensible position than three examples drawn from just one or two areas.

No matter what topic you end up writing about, the organization of your essay should be the same. Whether you’re asked to answer, “Can failure lead to success?” or “Does progress always come at a cost?” the structure of your essay should be almost identical. The ACT is looking for those standard ingredients, and the structure we’re about to explain will make sure those ingredients stand out in your essay.

So what’s this magical essay structure? Well, it’s back to the trusty fast food analogy: A good ACT essay is a lot like a triple-decker burger.

No matter what the topic is, how you feel about it, or which examples you choose, you should always follow this five-paragraph structure on your ACT essay. The first and last paragraphs are your essay’s introduction and conclusion; each of the middle three paragraphs discuss an example that supports and illustrates your argument. That’s it.

Just as important as the organization of your entire essay is the organization within each of the five paragraphs. Let’s take a closer look at each paragraph next.

The introduction to an ACT essay has to do three things:

To accomplish these three goals, you need three to four sentences in your introduction. These three to four sentences will convey your thesis statement and the overall map of your essay to the raters.

The thesis statement is the first sentence of your essay. It identifies where you stand on the topic and should pull the raters into the essay. A good thesis statement is strong, clear, and definitive. A good thesis statement for the essay prompt, “In your opinion, can failure lead to success?” is:

This thesis statement conveys the writer’s position on the topic boldly and clearly. In only a few words, it carves out the position that the essay will take on the very broad, vague topic: learning from failure yields success.

After the thesis statement, the rest of the first paragraph should serve as a kind of summary of the examples you will use to support your position on the topic. Explain and describe your three examples to make it clear how they fit into your argument. It’s usually best to give each example its own sentence. Here’s an example:

Three sentences, three examples. The rater knows exactly what to expect from your essay now and is ready to dive in.

Each of your 3 example paragraphs should follow this basic format:

Below we’ve given you an example of a strong meat paragraph:

The best meat paragraphs on the ACT essay are specific. The ACT’s essay directions say it loud and clear: “Use specific reasons and examples to support your position.” In its topic sentence, this paragraph states that the United States is one of the great examples of “a success achieved by studying and learning from earlier failures.” It then uses the specific example of the Articles of Confederation, the Annapolis convention, and the Constitution to prove its position. It’s specific throughout and even includes a few dates.

Your first meat paragraph dives right into its topic sentence, but the second and third meat paragraphs need transitions. The simplest way to build these transitions is to use words like another and finally. That means your second meat paragraph should start off with a transitional phrase such as, “Another example . . .”

A slightly more sophisticated way to build transitions is to choose examples from different sources, such as history and business. If the first paragraph is about a political instance of learning from failure and the second is from business, make that fact your transition: “As in politics, learning from failure is a means to gaining success in business as well. Take the case of . . .”

The conclusion of your essay should accomplish two main goals:

To accomplish these two goals, your conclusion should contain three to four sentences.

The recap is a one-sentence summary of what you’ve already argued. As in the thesis statement, the recap should be straightforward, bold, and declarative. By “broadening” your argument, we mean that you should attempt to link your specific examples to other fields, such as politics, business, and art. Here’s a recap example:

The last two or three sentences of the essay should take the argument you just recapped and push it a little further. One of the best ways to push your argument further is to look to the future and think about what would happen if the position that you’ve taken in your essay could be applied on a broader scale. Here’s an example:

The Bottom Bun wraps up the entire ACT essay. And there you have it! If you follow the template we have just provided, and break down the essay into its core ingredients, your ACT essay will be strong, clear, and easy to write.

To make sure you really get the essay organization we’re suggesting, we’ll sum it all up. Here’s the ACT essay outline you should use, no matter what topic you get or what position you take:

Taking a clear position and defending it with solid detailed examples is a strong start to a successful ACT essay. But the ACT–raters also care about the mechanics of your writing, which we call your “command of language.” Think of your command of language as your fast food essay’s Special Sauce—it’s the coating of perfect word choice, grammar, sentence structure, and spelling that oozes through your entire essay. An ACT essay with a clear position and strong examples won’t get a perfect score without the Special Sauce, so pay close attention to these three facets of your essay:

Did you notice how dull that entire last paragraph became after the first two sentences? That’s because every one of those sentences not only started in the same way but also all had the same predictable, plodding rhythm.

Now go back and look at the earlier sample meat paragraph on the Constitution. Notice how the various sentences start differently and also have different internal rhythms. These variations in sentence structure keep the writing vibrant and interesting. Focus on changing the structure of your sentences as you write the essay. You don’t have to invert every clause, but you should be careful not to let a few sentences in a row follow the same exact structure. You’ve got to mix it up. Here’s the boring first paragraph of this section rewritten with varied sentence structure:

Much easier to read and far less repetitive, right?

One great way to vary your sentence structure while increasing the logical flow of your essay is to use transitions. Transitions provide the context necessary to help readers understand the flow of your argument. They’re words, phrases, or sentences that take readers gently by the hand, leading them through your essay. Here are some examples of different kinds of transitions you can use to spice up your sentence structure:

Sometimes students think writing long, complicated sentences will impress teachers. Maybe, but it won’t impress ACT essay-raters. Keep your sentences short and simple. Complex sentences are difficult to understand, and your ACT essays should be as clear and easy to read as possible.

We could fill an entire book with guidelines for creating simple and succinct prose. Instead, we’ll give you two handy rules to simplify the sentences that you write on the ACT essay:

Those rules are certainly not foolproof, but abiding by them will keep you from filling your ACT essay with overly complex sentences and will ulitmately make your essay easier to understand.

When students see that “word choice” plays a part in their essay score, they often think they have to use tons of sophisticated vocabulary words in order to score well. That belief is wrong and potentially damaging to your ACT essay score. If you’re straining to put fancy words into your essay, you’re bound to end up misusing those words. And misusing a sophisticated word is a worse offense than not using one at all.

Word choice doesn’t mean that you have to go for the big word every time. It means you should go for the proper word, the best word, the word that makes your essay as clear as possible. Let’s look at part of the paragraph about the Constitution:

This is 6-level writing, but it isn’t teeming with five-syllable words. What the passage does do is use every single word correctly. When it includes an uncommon word, like beacon, it uses the word appropriately and effectively. Now that’s good word choice.

So don’t try to use a word unless you know what it means. Don’t go throwing around tough words in the hope that you’ll impress your rater. The likelihood is that you’re going to use the word incorrectly and give the rater a bad impression. Instead, keep it simple, and stick to words you know well.

A few grammar or spelling mistakes throughout your essay will not destroy your score. The ACT understands that you’re bound to make minor mistakes in a rushed 30-minute essay.

Raters are instructed to look for patterns of errors. If a rater sees that your punctuation is consistently wrong, that your spelling of familiar words is often incorrect, or that you write run-on sentences again and again, your score will suffer.

You need to be able to write solid grammatical sentences to score well on the essay. As for learning the grammar, well, you’re in luck. We cover all the rules of basic grammar and usage in the Usage/Mechanics Questions on the English Test section of this book.