by Erica L. Meltzer | Nov 1, 2025 | ACT English/SAT Writing, ACT Reading, Books
The Complete Guide to ACT English, Fifth Edition, and The Complete Guide to ACT Reading, Third Edition, are now available from Amazon.
The books are now aligned with the enhanced ACT and the 2025-2026 Official Guide.
Please note: While there are some minor content updates in both guides, and in the case of the ACT Reading book, a (short) new chapter, the majority of the edits were fairly superficial. As a result, there is no major disadvantage to using the current versions–if you are studying from the current books already, you do not need to purchase new ones.
You should, however, make sure to take practice tests from either the 2025-26 guide or the official “Preparing for the ACT” booklet in order to familiarize yourself with the timing and style of the updated exam.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Oct 19, 2025 | ACT English/SAT Writing, ACT Reading, Books
As of 10/19/25, the release of the updated versions of The Complete Guide to ACT® English and The Complete Guide to ACT® Reading has been tentatively scheduled for November 1st.
Revisions on both books are now complete, and the manuscripts are currently being prepared for publication.
Although the content changes are relatively minor, they are significant enough to require new editions numbers: the English book will be the fifth edition; the Reading book will be the third edition.
The books are aligned with the 2025-26 Official ACT Prep Guide and the new version of the test.
An announcement will be posted when the books are available for purchase. As always, I appreciate everyone’s patience. Book updates, no matter how small, involve many moving parts and are never an entirely straightforward process, but both guides are on track for release in the next couple of weeks.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Aug 2, 2025 | ACT English/SAT Writing, ACT Reading
As you may know, the ACT is following the SAT in making changes to its exam this year (in-school testing changed were rolled out in the spring of 2025; Saturday testing will be affected beginning in September).
In addition to the fact that a digital option is being made more widely available, the Science section will become optional, and the English and Reading sections will be shortened. The English test will be reduced from 75 to 50 questions, with the time decreasing from 45 to 35 minutes; the Reading will go from 40 to 36 questions, with the time increasing from 35 to 40 minutes.
However, aside from some minor stylistic alterations, e.g., the phrasing of certain question types, the actual substantive content of the exam will not change.
So to respond to the queries that I have been receiving:
1) Yes, I will be updating both the ACT English and Reading books. I’m tentatively planning to release them sometime late fall, most likely by November. Because the changes will be relatively minor, I am planning to keep the edition numbers the same.
2) If you are planning to sit for the ACT before then, the current versions of the books will still cover everything you need to know for the exam. You should, however, be sure to work with the most recent version of the Official Guide for full-length practice tests.
I will post book updates as the become available.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jul 24, 2021 | ACT Reading, Blog
As you may have heard, the ACT is tweaking its Reading test to include some graph- or chart-based questions similar to those on the Science test and the SAT Reading test. I’ve received several inquiries regarding these changes, so I wanted to let everyone know where things stand in terms of my materials.
First, yes, I will be updating The Complete Guide to ACT Reading, although not immediately.
Unfortunately, the 2021-22 ACT Official Guide does not include any sample passages accompanied by the new question type; as of July 2021, the only example I’ve been able to locate is the one posted on the ACT website, and, well… It doesn’t seem particularly well done (to put things diplomatically). In the absence of any material from administered tests, there’s also no way for me to tell how well it reflects what the actual exam will look like. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | May 28, 2021 | ACT Reading, Phonics, Reading (SAT & ACT), Tutoring, Tutors
In a recent post, I talked about the challenges that (ACT) tutors often face when working with struggling readers; I also discussed how different types of problems can signal difficulties in different component skills that combine to produce reading. In this post, I’m going to cover how to identify a reading problem and provide some strategies for determining whether it stems from decoding, aural comprehension, or both.
To quickly review, the Simple View (Gough and Tunmer, 1986) states that General Reading Ability = Decoding x Aural Comprehension, with the weaker factor limiting overall skill.
Proficient teenage-adult readers decode at approximately 200 words per minute, or the speed of speech; however, many struggling readers never learned sound-letter combinations well enough to “map” them orthographically—that is, to store them in their brains for automatic retrieval. As a result, they read slowly and dysfluently, and may guess at, skip, misread, reverse, add, or omit letters/words.
On the other side, weak vocabulary (particularly words denoting abstract concepts); difficulty making sense out of complex syntax; and poor general knowledge can cause students who are solid decoders to have trouble understanding what they read.
Problems can be restricted to either of these areas; however, they often involve both factors and together produce a general reading problem. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | May 22, 2021 | ACT Reading, Blog, Phonics, Tutoring, Tutors
Image by GOLFX, Shutterstock
When Breaking the Code, the reading-instruction group I helped found in the summer of 2020, held its most recent workshop last week, I stuck an announcement in my newsletter almost as an afterthought. A test-prep tutor had participated in our previous workshop and seemed to have gotten a lot of out of it, and it occurred to me that others might be interested. Nevertheless, I was a bit taken aback at the number of inquiries I received from ACT tutors—more emails, incidentally, than I got from elementary-school teachers.
In retrospect, this should not have been at all surprising, but I guess that given all the current backlash over standardized testing, I neglected to realize how many students are still getting tutored for college-admissions exams, and how many tutors are encountering the exact same kinds of reading problems I repeatedly saw. The issues I discuss here do also apply to the SAT (and any other standardized test), but I’m focusing on the ACT here because it brings a set of specific issues into particularly sharp focus. (more…)
