After identifying the main idea, you will find the supporting points, the details, facts, and explanations that develop and clarify the main idea.
Some texts make that task relatively easy. Textbooks, for instance, include headings and subheadings intended to make it easier for students to identify core concepts. Graphic features, such as sidebars, diagrams, and charts, help students understand complex information and distinguish between essential and nonessential points. When you are assigned to read from a textbook, be sure to use available comprehension aids to help you identify the main points.
Trade books and popular articles may not be written specifically for an educational purpose; nevertheless, they also include features that can help you identify the main ideas. These features include the following:
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Trade books. Many trade books include an introduction that presents the writer’s main ideas and purpose for writing. Reading chapter titles (and any subtitles within the chapter) will help you get a broad sense of what is covered. It also helps to read the beginning and ending paragraphs of a chapter closely. These paragraphs often sum up the main ideas presented.
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Popular articles. Reading the headings and introductory paragraphs carefully is crucial. In magazine articles, these features (along with the closing paragraphs) present the main concepts. Hard news articles in newspapers present the gist of the news story in the lead paragraph, while subsequent paragraphs present increasingly general details.
At the far end of the reading difficulty scale are scholarly books and journal articles. Because these texts are written for a specialized, highly educated audience, the authors presume their readers are already familiar with the topic. The language and writing style is sophisticated and sometimes dense.
When you read scholarly books and journal articles, try to apply the same strategies discussed earlier. The introduction usually presents the writer’s thesis, the idea or hypothesis the writer is trying to prove. Headings and subheadings can help you understand how the writer has organized support for his or her thesis. Additionally, academic journal articles often include a summary at the beginning, called an abstract, and electronic databases include summaries of articles, too.
Strategy to Locate Supporting Details
To help locate the supporting details of a paragraph, first identify the main idea. Then turn the main idea statement into a question. You can use a “w” word to do this (whom, what, when, where, why or how)
Example Paragraph
To be effective, feedback on someone’s work must have certain characteristics. First, it must be timely, occurring soon after the work has been done. Second, it must be accurate. The best work should get the most positive feedback; the poorest work should get the most negative feedback. Finally, feedback should be tailored to the recipient, expressed in a way suited to that person’s personality and abilities.
Topic: effective feedback
Main Idea: To be effective, feedback on someone’s work must have certain characteristics
Question: What characteristics must feedback on someone’s work contain?
Supporting Details: timely, accurate, tailored to the recipient
Two Types of Supporting Details
There are two types of supporting details: major and minor.
- Major details: directly explain develop, or illustrate the main idea.
- They are the principal (most important points the author is making about the topic.
- Minor details: explain a major detail further. The main idea would still be clear if the minor details were left out.
- Not as important as major details
- Used to add interest and to give further descriptions, examples, testimonies, analysis, illustrations and reasons for the major details.
As ideas move from general to specific details, the author often uses signal words to introduce a new detail. These signal words (such as first, second, next, in addition, or finally)can help you identify major and minor details.
Supporting details are reasons, examples, facts, steps, or other kinds of evidence that develop and support the main idea. Supporting details should relate to the main idea.
Watch the following video about main ideas and supporting details:
CC Licensed Content, Shared Previously
Content adapted from an open course from Broward, licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license.
Content adapted from “Reading and Writing in College,” section 1.1 from the book Successful Writing (v. 1.0), licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license.
Video Content
Video: “Finding Main Ideas and Supporting Details Example” from Progressive Bridges