One simple strategy you can use is to highlight, underline, circle, or otherwise mark the main idea, explanations, examples, and evidence. Take a look at this passage from a psychology textbook. The student used highlighters to identify the presentation pattern at the paragraph level for improved reading comprehension.

Main Idea                   Explanation                Examples                    Evidence

More than 200 years ago, philosophers such as John Locke and David Hume echoed Aristotle’s conclusion from 200 years earlier: We learn by association. Our minds naturally connect events that occur in sequence. If, after seeing and smelling freshly baked bread, you eat some and find it satisfying, then the next time you see and smell fresh bread, your experience will lead you to expect that eating it will be satisfying again. And if you associate a sound with a frightening consequence, then your fear may be aroused by the sound itself. As one 4-year-old exclaimed after watching a TV character get mugged, “If I had heard that music, I wouldn’t have gone around the corner!” (p. 313-314)

Passage from: Myers, David, G. (2007). Psychology. 8th edition. New York: Worth Publishers.

As you can see, the student created a color code for the main idea, explanations, examples, and evidence to help visually understand the passage. Remember to look for key words that signal examples, evidence, and other supporting ideas. Strengthening your awareness of signal words such as “for example, as, like, imagine” can improve your reading comprehension.

Identifying Supporting Details First

When you struggle to locate the main idea of a paragraph, you can use this process of elimination strategy. By identifying the supporting details first, you can narrow down the paragraph’s contents to arrive at the main idea. Here are instructions you can follow: Locate the 3 E’s–examples, evidence, and explanations–to identify the supporting details of the following passage. Then if there is a sentence left, consider whether it is the main idea. It helps to have various colored highlighters, one for each type of supporting material, and to create a color code as this student did here:

Examples               Evidence                Explanations

Signal detection can also have life-or-death consequences when people are responsible for watching an airport scanner for weapons, monitoring patients from an intensive-car nursing station, or detecting radar blips. Studies have shown, for example, that people’s ability to catch a faint signal diminishes after about 30 minutes. But this diminishing response depends on the task, on the time of day, and even on whether the participants periodically exercise (Warm & Dember, 1986). Experience matters, too. In one experiment, 10 hours of action video game playing–scanning for and instantly responding to any intrusion–increased novice players’ signal detection skills (p. 199- 200).

Passage from: Myers, D. G. (2007). Psychology. (8th ed.). New York: Worth Publishers.

By first identifying the examples, evidence, and explanations, we then see that this paragraph’s main idea comes at the start: “Signal detection can also have life-or-death consequences.” If, however, all the sentences in a paragraph are identified as examples, evidence and explanation, perhaps there is an implied main idea–one that is not stated directly. You should then consider the context of the previous and subsequent paragraphs to determine the implied main idea. Remember to look for key words that signal examples, evidence, and other supporting ideas.

Attributions

The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. Developed by The University of Texas at El Paso.

Student Version. Building Reading Comprehension Project