🧐 Overview: What is topic development?

Topic development questions are a type of question that will show up in the Production of Writing section of your ACT English test.

These are questions that test your rhetorical analysis skills, and how you apply those skills in your writing. If you’ve taken AP English Language and Composition, or the SAT English exam, this might sound familiar. You will be analysing whether or not the writer is adequately communicating their theme, or developing their topic 🤓

They may sound daunting and complicated at first, but most of them follow a pattern, and they’re easier to understand once you’ve broken them down into their main components: identifying the purpose of a text (or parts of it!), whether the text meets its intended goal, and determining its relevance. 

🧠 Concepts to Know

Let’s take a closer look at these three main components 👀 These are the main concepts you’ll need to know for this part of the ACT. 

💡Purpose

A text’s purpose is why the author is writing it. This can generally be described using a single verb. The main ones to remember are to inform, to entertain, and to persuade. Occasionally though, you may run across a text whose purpose is to satirize, to discredit, or something entirely different. 

To inform: to educate the reader and provide information about a certain topic. Think of scientific articles that contain facts and evidence. 

To persuade: to convince you of something. Think of argumentative essays where the author is proving that a certain standpoint is right. 

To entertain: to simply write something that is enjoyable to read. Think of poems and short stories. 

To examine a text’s purpose, you need to be able to identify its topic or thesis. If you’re having trouble doing this, ask yourself what the point of the passage is. Why is the author writing about this topic? What is the author telling you?

🎯 Intended Goal

Intended goal is related to purpose. Where purpose is what the author is trying to communicate, and their reason for talking about a certain subject, intended goal evaluates whether or not the text or a portion of the text has stayed relevant to the purpose and the author is staying on track and effectively communicating a single theme.

🗂️ Relevance

Relevance is the “so what?” part of writing. Everything the author adds to their text should be relevant to the purpose. It examines how parts of the passage are related to the passage as a whole, and whether or not the passage is cohesive throughout. 

Examining relevance includes asking yourself if certain pieces of information add anything to the purpose of the text, whether or not deleting certain sentences would prevent the reader from understanding a main point, or even whether or not adding a sentence could help with understanding.

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🪄 Tips and Tricks

1. Grammar

Make sure you know your basic grammar rules. These aren’t just important for Topic Development, but for the entire ACT English test! 

This is the knowledge you will be applying the most in this section, because this section tests how well you use the skills you’ve learned when writing and analyzing texts. 

If you don’t feel confident in some of your grammar rules yet, start easy and build up towards harder questions 💪 This also applies to all other question types you might see in this section, baby steps!

2. Structure

Building off of the last tip: understand structure 📖. This is crucial when analyzing texts, because the way they are structured often help the writer effectively communicate their intent and can make the flow of ideas easier, which can improve a text’s relevance!

A text that is all over the place and has no structure is much harder to understand, and often will contain irrelevant information. If you understand structure (eg: thesis, paragraph types, sentence placement and cohesion) you will more easily recognize a text that is not well structured and does not have a clear message. If it does not have a clear message, it is likely not fulfilling its intended purpose. 

Recognizing this is only the first part though— you also have to be able to apply your structure knowledge to decide how to fix it (or if it even needs to be fixed, remember that NO CHANGE is a valid option on some of these questions!).

3. Active Reading

Moving away from the more technical tricks, it’s also important to read actively. Some of those texts you’ll come across are boring (it is an exam after all 😉), so you might find yourself zoning out or just not understanding what they say. 

Try to avoid that by engaging with the text. The best way to do this depends on how you process information, but some potential strategies include: highlighting/underlining, making annotations, or even just drawing little stars or exclamation marks in places that seem significant, so that you know where to look when answering questions 🌟

4. Strategy

Part of reading actively includes answering questions strategically. Again, how you do this really depends on what works best for you, but some strategies include: reading the questions before reading the text, answering questions referring to specific lines first, or planning out how you’ll go through the questions (will you answer them by section? All at once?).

5. Practice

Finally, practice! This is the most important tip we can give you. To be successful, you have to practice 💯

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Example Questions

Example: Purpose

Purpose questions will often give you the writer’s main purpose and ask you whether or not the text accomplishes that purpose, such as the question below:

Image courtesy of ACT, inc.

When approaching purpose questions, try to recall what you originally believed the purpose was after reading the article. If your answer was wildly different than the given purpose, this is a good sign that the writer did not accomplish it. But before answering, read through the text again and take note of the main points the writer brings up, and exactly what the text is discussing.

Example: Intended Goal

Before you can determine whether or not intended goal has been met, you need to have determined purpose. Only then can you decide that yes, it has been met, or no, it hasn’t. If it has been met, the answer will often be NO CHANGE. If it hasn’t been met, you will often need to figure out which option is the best way to replace the portion of the passage. But some cases, such as the one below, are a little bit more complex.

Image courtesy of ACT, inc.

In this question, instead of deciding whether or not an existing part of the passage meets the intended goal, you need to add a sentence that will communicate the purpose. 

Just like other intended goal questions, you need to determine what the purpose of the paragraph is, and from there, narrow down a choice that makes sense. In a question like this, a choice that makes sense is one that not only communicates the main idea but also keeps the text flowing. 

Example: Relevance

Approaching relevance questions relies on you being able to filter out irrelevant information. 

For example, if the passage is about the history of chocolate bars, you don’t need information about current statistics on who likes to eat chocolate bars, but you might need information about the first person who made a chocolate bar.

Image courtesy of ACT, inc.

In this example you are asked which of the options is most cohesive with the next paragraph in the passage, ie, which option best leads the reader into the next topic of the passage. To determine this, you need to first read and understand the next paragraph. What is being said in it? It might help to determine the purpose of this paragraph as well. 

From there, you can begin filtering out choices. Start with the process of elimination, some of these options may be clearly wrong (eg: does Woodland and Silver’s status as graduate students really matter in this paragraph?), so get rid of those first. Then, start trying to figure out which pieces of information relate most to the main idea of the paragraph. 

💡 What is the main idea of the paragraph? This is a good question to ask when answering a question like this.

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✅ TLDR; Your ACT English: Topic Development Checklist

**tldr; Topic development is a type of question you will see in the ACT English section that evaluates a passage’s purpose, intended goal, and relevance. **

Checklist

• • Do you know your basic grammar rules?
• • Do you understand structure?
• • Do you understand what the text is saying?
• • Do you have a strategy for approaching a text and its questions?
• • Do you know how to identify purpose?
• • Do you know how to determine whether or not a text achieves its intended goal?
• • Is every part of the text you are examining relevant to its purpose?
• • Finally, have you practiced, and do you feel confident about this subject? 🥳