How do I find main ideas?

Sometimes main ideas are confused with topics. “Organic farming practices” is a topic. “Organic farming practices should be adopted by all farmers” is a main idea. Discovering the topic of the work can be a start to discovering the main idea.

Finding the topic and the main idea is easy if you know where to look. Main ideas or clues about main ideas are often found at the beginning or ending of a paragraph in expository writing. For longer works, information about the main idea is often found in the first and the last paragraph.

For other types of works, you may need to rely on clues about the main idea. You may also need to rely on the basic reading skill call making inferences. Words or phrases which are repeated through out the works are usually related to the main idea. Sometimes ideas are repeated by using different words or phrases. It is important to look carefully at how the ideas and sentences are related.

Skimming a work, reading parts of a work quickly, can help you predict the main idea of a work before you begin reading more carefully. Scanning, looking for specific words, phases, or patterns, can help you locate words or details related to the topic or main idea.