Finding the Main Point
No matter what you are reading or why you are reading it, you want to make sure that you understand the main point. The main point is the key idea that the author is trying to convey in the text.
The techniques in this chapter apply best to nonfiction work, including scholarly articles, informational texts, textbooks, and arguments. While they can also be used for fiction or creative nonfiction, strategies for reading literature often work better for these types of texts because literary texts don’t always have a clear main point. If you are reading fiction or creative nonfiction, I recommend asking your professor for guidance.
The techniques in this section can be used separately, but they can also be used together.
Break the Reading into Sections
Just like chapters in a novel, informative and other nonfiction texts are often made up of sections. A section of a text has a point of its own. You can think of sections in a text like building blocks, each adding to the structure and content of the whole. In this fashion, each section should contribute at least one key idea to the main point.
Keep in mind that it often takes several paragraphs to work through the explanation of a single point. A section might be as short as a single paragraph, but it also might be much longer—six, eight, ten paragraphs long.
You can treat each section as its own little mini-text and work to find the main point of that section. If you understand the point of each section, you can often piece together the main point by combining the points of the sections.
It is usually helpful to try to summarize each section of text in one or two sentences. When you read those sentences together, you can often more easily see the main point. This approach can also get you started on a full summary of the text.
Texts with Obvious Section Breaks
Sometimes sections will be obvious because they will be labeled with headings. You’ll see this in textbooks, for example. These headings work like titles in that they can give you clues about the contents of that section.
Sometimes, headings are conventional . For example, in scholarly research essays in many fields, headings such as “method,” “results,” and “discussion” tell an experienced reader what kind of information to expect in each of those sections.
Even if you don’t find any headings, sometimes you’ll see extra space between paragraphs, often with a decorative symbol (like ‡ or ***). Even though these dividers have no heading, you can still treat them as sections, but without the information that a heading would provide.
Texts Without Obvious Section Breaks
Sometimes, there are no headings or spacing to guide you in dividing up a text. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t sections.
Look first for changes in topics. In some texts, authors will talk about a series of topics that are related but are clearly distinct from one another. For example, a text that describes harms caused by climate change might discuss di