Agreement and Verb Forms
Finding the real subject and matching the real timeline
The ACT almost never puts a subject right next to its verb on an agreement question. Instead it wedges a prepositional phrase between them: 'The box of donated coats were sitting by the door.' Your ear hears 'coats were' and approves. The grammar says the subject is 'box', so the verb must be 'was'. The distance is the whole trick.
Cross out every phrase starting with a preposition (of, in, on, with, from, between) before matching subject to verb. What is left is the true skeleton: box was sitting. This is the single highest-yield habit on the grammar questions.
Tricky singulars
These words are grammatically singular no matter what follows them: each, either, neither, everyone, everybody, anyone, nobody, and every 'one of the...' construction. 'Each of the interns has submitted hours.' Collective nouns like team, committee, company, and jury are also singular on the ACT: 'The committee meets on Tuesdays.' For 'neither X nor Y', match the verb to the nearer subject: 'Neither the coach nor the players were ready.'
Sentences starting with 'There is' or 'There are' flip the order: the real subject comes after the verb. 'There are three reasons' because 'reasons' is the subject. The test hides this by stuffing an interrupter in between: 'There is, according to the survey, three reasons' should be 'There are'.
Tense: match the timeline
Verb tense questions are timeline questions. Find the time anchors in the surrounding sentences: 'last spring', 'by 1998', 'today', 'will'. Then keep every verb consistent with that anchor unless the meaning genuinely jumps in time. 'Last spring she trained for the marathon and finished in under four hours': both verbs live in the same past moment, so both wear past tense.
When two past events are stacked, the earlier one takes 'had' plus the past participle: 'By the time the pizza arrived, we had already eaten.' If the sentence says 'by the time' or 'before', expect a 'had' somewhere.
Irregular verbs the test loves
After 'have', 'has', or 'had', use the participle form, not the simple past: had gone (not had went), had seen (not had saw), had done, had begun, had drunk, had grown. Writing 'would have went' in a college essay is the kind of error that quietly costs credibility, and it is exactly what the ACT underlines.
Real-life payoff: this is the same skill that keeps your cover letters sharp. 'The range of my experiences have prepared me' is the classic application-essay blunder, and after this lesson you will never write it again.