Main Idea

What is the best way to improve your understanding of reading materials? Many different skills come together to make a good reader. But you should start with locating the main idea.

You may already know that a paragraph is a group of sentences that are about the same thing. The main idea of a paragraph is the most important thought of that paragraph. It's the point that the author is trying to make. The main idea is often, though not always, stated in a single sentence. The other sentences in the paragraph give supporting details; that means they explain, describe, or give examples that help strengthen your understanding of the main idea.

An author often gives the main idea in the first sentence of a paragraph and then presents the supporting details. Sometimes an author may feel it is more effective to give all the supporting details and evidence before stating the main idea. The details lead up to the final sentence, which then summarizes them by giving the main idea. There is also a third pattern. The author may choose to place the main idea in a sentence somewhere in the middle of the paragraph.

Example

In the paragraph below, the author has stated the main idea in the middle of the paragraph.
       In the beginning, there’s the crunch. Always. Bite into a red apple or a green one, a red one streaked with yellow, a yellow one with a rosy blush, round or oblong, baseball-size or softball-size, and before the flavor, before even the tang of acidity, there’s the crunch. At least, there’d better be. If you bit into a peach or a plum or any other fruit and it crunches, you figure it’s either dead green or frozen solid. If you bit into an apple, you expect it to crunch. A soft apple is . . .disgusting. You put it aside. Or you choke it down. Or you feed it to a grateful horse.

From “Varieties come and go, but apples remain a staple” by Daniel Jack Chasan, Smithsonian, Volume 17, Number 6, 1986

The main idea of this paragraph, stated in the sixth sentence, is that apples are expected to be crunchy. Notice how all the other sentences contribute to your understanding of this idea. The first three sentences tell you that crunchiness is the first sensation you have when biting into an apple. The fifth sentence tells you that no other fruit crunches like an apple does. The last four sentences describe how disappointing it is when an apple is not crunchy.

See pages 15–23 and 50–52 in Contemporary's GED Language Arts, Reading for more information on main idea.