Organization Questions | English for ACT PDF Download

Introduction

ACT English essays have strict requirements for organization, so it's important to pay attention to these types of questions. These questions often focus on the presence of clear topic sentences or chronological order, and failing to meet these requirements can negatively impact your score. Here are some key things to keep in mind when it comes to organization questions on the ACT English section.

There are three particularly common types of organization questions:

• Ordering sentences or paragraphs
• Choosing the best introduction or conclusion
• Choosing the best transition word or phrase

Ordering sentences or paragraph

When you come across a question that requires you to rearrange sentences or paragraphs in the most logical order, there are two things you need to keep in mind: chronology and coherence. Chronology is simple and straightforward; it involves putting things in the right order, such as starting with a famous person's childhood and ending with their death in a biography. Coherence is about making sure that each sentence builds on the previous one in terms of content. Sometimes, coherence and chronology go hand in hand. For instance, a passage about seasons should be arranged in the right order.

Here's a challenging example to illustrate this point:

What is the most logical placement for sentence 2?

(1)Scholars posit that a play on the subject of Hamlet was written by Thomas Kyd ten years before Shakespeare's iconic play. (2) Though the original version of "Hamlet" by Kyd, the "Ur-Hamlet," has been lost, it is speculated that it shared similarities with Kyd's "The Spanish Tragedy," or that the latter was influenced by the former. (3) This revelation comes as a surprise to many admirers who assumed that Shakespeare was the sole author of Hamlet.

To solve this question, it is helpful to rephrase each sentence to extract its essence. Sentence 1 informs us that Thomas Kyd wrote a play about Hamlet before Shakespeare did. Sentence 2 suggests that Kyd's "Ur-Hamlet" had many similarities with The Spanish Tragedy. Sentence 3 reveals that the fact that Kyd wrote a play about Hamlet comes as a surprise to many fans who thought that Hamlet was solely Shakespeare's creation. The crucial point here is that the surprise is about Kyd writing a play about Hamlet, not the similarities with The Spanish Tragedy mentioned in sentence 2. Therefore, sentence 3 should follow sentence 1, and sentence 2 should come after sentence 3.

Choosing the best introduction or conclusion

To accurately respond to organizational questions, you must examine the paragraph's central concept and select an option that achieves two objectives:

• summarizes the main idea and 
• connects with the preceding and subsequent paragraphs. If the question is about an introductory sentence, the previous paragraph must be considered, while the current and following paragraphs should be taken into account for a concluding sentence. 

Avoid answer choices that are too general or specific since they might either encompass more than the paragraph's content or provide only one specific detail.

Choosing the best transition

Let’s jump right into an ACT example for this one:
As she got older, Katerina did not find ice skating as appealing as she once did. Though, she cut back on her practice time and spent more time on other activities.
(a) NO CHANGE
(b) Therefore,
(c) In fact,
(d) Furthermore,

On a question like this, we need to pick the transition that best communicates the relationship these sentences are trying to express. One way to handle this is to temporarily put a blank in the sentence where the transition is supposed to go, ignore the answer choices, and try to come up with your own connection → Katerina did not find ice skating appealing. ______, she cut back on her practice time and spent more time on other activities.
The connection between these two ideas is about cause and effect (Katerina didn’t like ice skating so much anymore, soshe cut back on her training), so we need a word or phrase that communicates this. Words and phrases such as “so,” “as a result,” or “consequently” would best achieve this goal and, so, answer choice B “therefore” consequently fits in best with this group.