Basic Reading Comprehension Skills

Mastering the basic reading skills will help you understand and remember the events and information you read. All of the basic skills work together. For example, it is difficult to find the main idea if you do not also find details or use context clues. Although the basic skills are presented one at a time for clarity, they all work together.

The Main Idea

A main idea has two parts. It has a topic and it has a comment about the topic. For example, “pizza” names a topic. “is good for you” tells about the topic. Put the topic and the comment together and you have a main idea.

“Pizza is good for you.”

Look for main ideas by:

• reading the first sentence of a paragraph
  
  
• reading the last sentence of a paragraph
  
  
• finding repeated words or ideas