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Main Idea/Theme



"Reading furnishes the mind only with materials for knowledge;
it is thinking that makes what we read ours."


Main Idea – Where it Lies

Because we worked so much on The Necklace in the previous lesson, we will continue to use it as an example for much of our discussion in this lesson.

In terms of The Necklace, the main idea also can be seen as the moral of the story. In the case of The Necklace, there are three potential morals:

  • The first is that contentment often lies in what we already have, not in what we wish we could have. Mathilde was not contented with her beauty, her maid, or even her husband.

  • The second idea is borrowing something we believe will make us happy may never work out the way we had planned. As Shakespeare had Polonius say in Hamlet, "Neither a borrower nor lender be…"

  • The last moral is to tell the truth. Had Mathilde told her friend the truth about the necklace, even if it had been valuable, Mathilde and her husband would have made restitution. But imagine their lives if they only had to pay back the necklace's true worth.

The main idea of any reading is learned by reading with a questioning mind to determine what the author is trying to say to you. This is absolutely the point in reading anything.

In a testing situation, you can be alerted to "Main Idea" questions by questions such as:

  • Which of the following expresses the main idea of the passage?

  • What would be the most appropriate title for this selection?

  • TheWhich statement below expresses the author's main point?

When handling "Main Idea" questions, the test maker wants to know that you understood the overall content of the piece and were able to grasp the message the author was relaying. While there may be a great many facts included in either the story or the passage, you need to sift through all those supporting ideas to get to the main point.

The "Main Idea" can be considered the thesis of the piece. A thesis statement is usually a sentence somewhere in the passage. Some writers put their thesis statement as one of the last sentences of their introductory paragraph. OR, you may find it all the way at the very end of the passage.

No, the author will not say, "The thesis of this paper is…" Usually there is no obvious indicator of a thesis statement. That is something you must derive in your reading of the passage.

Sometimes the thesis isn't actually stated in a single sentence. As in the case of The Necklace, the reader must read through the entire story and determine that a thesis can be derived only by considering the entire story as a whole.

When approaching a Main Idea or Thesis question on a reading comprehension test, scan the first paragraph and the final paragraph to see if you can discover an obvious thesis statement. If you believe you may have found a thesis statement, quickly look through the questions to see if any of the answer choices match what you have found.

If you did not discover a thesis statement yet, then read the first and last sentence of each paragraph, getting a general sense of the entire passage. Then return to the answer choices to see if there is one answer that tentatively could be correct.

The final step, and the best one, is to read the entire passage and then formulate your own thesis statement before looking at the various answer choices on the exam. If your thesis statement differs greatly from the choices, or if you have now chosen two different possible answers, then you will have to do a little detective work.

That detective work involves reading the test maker's mind and see if you can discover what is called a "wrong answer ploy" or "wrong answer trick."

Yes, there are such things! We will cover this in the next section.

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