Effective Reading: Finding Topics and Main Ideas

Topics
To identify a topic in a reading text, we should know what a paragraph is and what it consists of.
A paragraph is a series of sentences that tells about a single topic. It usually has a topic and main idea. A
topic is the general idea that represents the whole text.
A topic can be …
- a name of thing with many parts.
For example, house.
Its parts: roof, walls, stairs, etc.
Its rooms: kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, etc.
- a name of general idea that includes more specific things.
For example, camping.
Things to bring: sleeping bag, medicine, jacket, etc.
Things to pay attention to: weather, route, etc.
- a name of a group of things or people
For example, air companies
- a trending issue that has various explanations depending on the writers’ intention
For example, COVID 19
An author wants to tell the readers how COVID 19 are spread out between people.
Another author wants to tell the readers the socioeconomic effects of COVID 19 pandemic.
We can identify the topic by figuring out the supporting facts and ideas that explain the topic and looking
at the beginning of the paragraph, and finding the pronoun or other words that refer to the same thing.
Let’s have a look at the following example:
1. Look at the repeated words and references.

Malaysia accounts for 26 percent of the vast production of palm oil today, making it a great
creator for the local economy as well. Almost half of oil palms in that country are grown by
smallholders rather than large-scale agribusiness. The crop is so important that government
insiders consider its development synonymous with the eradication of poverty in Malaysia.
Between 1980 and 2010, palm oil cultivation doubled in Malaysia. Then, in just four years, it
doubled again.

Source:
http://nautil.us/issue/90/something-green/the-environmental-headache-in-your-shampoo

2. Look at the details and facts about those words.

Malaysia accounts for 26 percent of the vast production of palm oil today, making it a great
creator for the local economy as well. Almost half of oil palms in that country are grown by
smallholders rather than large-scale agribusiness. The crop is so important that government
 insiders consider its development synonymous with the eradication of poverty in Malaysia.
Between 1980 and 2010, palm oil cultivation doubled in Malaysia. Then, in just four years, it
doubled again.

Source:
http://nautil.us/issue/90/something-green/the-environmental-headache-in-your-shampoo

After selecting the important parts of the text, we can identify that topic is the economic effect of palm oil
industry in Malaysia. From here, we can see that skimming (reading for general ideas) can be applied to
identify topic.

Main Ideas
Main idea is the writer’s idea about the topic. It is basically the extension of a topic and the central point
of the discussion in a paragraph or whole text. Depending on the writers’ intention, main idea can be
purely writers’ opinion regarding the topic. To find the main idea, we could ask ourselves, “What does the
writer want to say about this topic?”
Some paragraphs have clear main idea. However, some others do not have a certain sentence that
expresses the main idea. Therefore, we have to read several sentences to conclude and get the main idea.
To identify main ideas, we can read the first or the last paragraph, use the information in several
sentences to understand the main idea, and look at the sentences that mention the topic.
Look at the following examples:
1. We can look at the first sentence of the paragraph

The current studies explored the reading practices of students at a university in the UK. First
study aimed to examine how long students spend reading academic material, aiming to extend
previous research by examining different types of reading including guided or assigned
reading and independent reading. Differences berween students in each year group were also
examined. The second study aimed to explore potential reasons for the finding that the
number of hours students dedicated to reading is fewer that expected. Study three then aimed
to examine the evidence for two of these potential key reasons; a lack of time for reading and a
lack of confidence with reading.

Source: https://doi.org/10.1080/20004508.2017.1380487

Here we can conclude that the main idea in this paragraph is that the present studies examined how
students at a university in the UK practiced reading.

2. We can use the information in several sentences to understand the main idea.

Rob Martienssen, a plant biologist at Cold Spring Harbor Lab, has been one of the world’s key
researchers into the puzzles of palm oil production: why scientific methods have gone wrong
 in the past, and how to right those wrongs today. Launching a project to grow more palm oil
on less land was the easy part, he knew. Scientists locked in on that goal some decades ago
and set out to clone a single “elite” palm, one that produced a bounty of oil, into 50,000 palms
just like it. They even succeeded, up to a point. “They thought this was going to solve all
problems,” Martienssen says, but cloning the elite palm in the lab turned out to offend the
plant’s natural growth processes. Once planted, the identical trees were “mantled”: Instead of
yielding the promised bounty, the plants produced gnarled fruit that gave no oil.

Sources:
http://nautil.us/issue/90/something-green/the-environmental-headache-in-your-shampoo

Here we can conclude that the main idea of the paragraph is that researchers had succeeded in finding
some ways to grow more palm oil on less land, but the fruits produced no oil.

When we have found the main ideas, we can highlight the sentences and rewrite it using our own words
to make us remember and understand the points more deeply.

Bibliography

Bailey, S. (2015). Academic Writing: A Handbook for International Students (fifth). Routledge.

Bendebury, A., & Delay, M. S. (2020, September). The Environmental Headache in Your Shampoo.
https://nautil.us/the-environmental-headache-in-your-shampoo-9266/

Clair-Thompson, H. S., Graham, A., & Marsham, S. (2018). Exploring the Reading Practices of
Undergraduate Students. Education Inquiry, 9(3), 284–298.

Ritchey, K. A., & List, A. (2021). Task-Oriented Reading: A Framework for Improving College
Students’ Reading Compliance and Comprehension. College Teaching.
https://doi.org/10.1080/87567555.2021.1924607