Highlighting Patterns
of
Main Ideas and
Support
Non-fiction academic texts, including
textbooks and journal articles, follow a fairly predictable pattern of
main idea-support. Therefore, when you read this type of text, you should
always be looking for such patterns.
Why?
If you are consciously looking for such patterns you will be more engaged
in reading, and, hopefully, you will remember more of what you read. Even
more importantly, you will be "excavating," or “digging up and removing,”
ideas from the text, rather than just focusing on words. Your goal in reading
is to discover an author's ideas about his/her topic and then to put those
ideas in your head, so focusing on patterns of ideas rather than on words
should help you increase your understanding of what you read. In other
words, it should help you increase your reading comprehension.
So
where do highlighters come in? In the American academic writing tradition
(actually pretty much every type of formal non-fiction writing in English),
the writer must clearly and directly present his/her main idea along with
details that support, in other words, explain or validate, it in concrete
terms. But that's not all the writer has to do. He/she must also use transitions
and other connective devices to directly show how his/her supporting details
and examples really do explain or validate the main ideas in his/her text.
That means the writer must add a lot of words in his/her text that don't
directly present the text's the main ideas or the support. Instead, these
words and phrases serve as the glue between main ideas and support. However,
these words and phrases provide a valuable service to an active reader.
As it turns
out these "connecting" words and phrases also serve as signposts, or signals,
that make the relationships between the ideas in a well-written text very
clear to the reader. In other words, they directly show the conscience
reader which ideas in the text are more general, or abstract, and which
are more specific, or concrete.
The
connecting words and phrases in American academic writing 
are
there to directly "force" a reader to follow a certain pattern of logical
development, or understanding. US American culture, as well as cultures
in most other indigenously native speaking English counties such as England
and Australia, focuses on linear individuality rather than on a collective
consensus. In individualistic cultures, a writer must show exactly how
ideas work together in his/her mind to support and explain one another.
There can be nothing left to question in terms of how the writer gets from
point A to point B in his/her reasoning. It is as if the writer invites
the reader on a "thought hike" and holds the reader's hand each step of
the way, explaining not only what the reader experiences at one particular
point of the hike, but also how that experience relates to other ideas
on the hike.It is really as if the invited hiker were blind and the writer's
task is not only to move the guest along the trail, but also explain what
the hiker might being seeing on the journey if he/she were sighted.
What
about the highlighters? You can see from the paragraphs above that when
you read American academic writing, you are processing a lot more than
just main ideas and support. You are also learning the writer's understanding
of the relationship between his/her main ideas and support. After reading
a text, you want to remember the main ideas and their supporting details
and examples, but you also want to remember how the writer feels these
things are related. That is why people outline what they read as a way
to more easily remember not only main ideas and support but also the relationships
presented by the writer between those main ideas and support. When you
write an outline, you show the relationships between ideas presented by
the author by indenting supporting material. Many students, however, don't
like to make outlines because it is time consuming. This is where highlighters
come into the picture. You can use differently colored highlighters to
"outline" a text so that the patterns of main ideas and support are easily
seen the second, third, fourth…time you read it.
The following passage has had its patterns
of main idea/support marked using three different colors your highlighters
according to this legend:
MAIN
IDEA color=
SUPPORTING
or TRANSITIONAL
color=
DETAIL
color =
Human
intelligence is among the most fragile
things in nature. It doesn’t
take much todistract
it,suppress
it, or even annihilate
it. In this century, we have had some lethal examples of how
easily and quickly intelligence can be defeated by any one of its several
nemeses: ignorance, superstition, moral fervor, cruelty, cowardice, neglect.
In the late1920s,
for example, Germany was, by any measure, the most
literate, cultured nation in the world. Its legendary
seats of learning attracted scholars from every corner. Its philosophers, social
critics, and scientists
were first rank; its human traditions and inspiration to less
favored nations. But
by the end
of the mid-1930s--that is, in less than ten years--this cathedral
of human reason had been transformed
into a cesspool of
barbaric irrationality. Many of the most intelligent
products of German culture were forced
to flee--for example Einstein, Freud, Karl
Jaspers,Thomas
Mann, and Stefan
Zweig.Even worse, those
who remained were forced
to submit their minds tothe
sovereignty of primitive
superstition,or--worse
still--willingly
did so: Konrad
Lorenz, Werner
Heisenburg, Martin Heidegger, Gerhardt
Huptmann.On May
10, 1933, a huge bonfire was kindled in
Berlin and the books
of Marcel Proust, Andre
Gide, Emile
Zola, Jack
London, Upton
Sinclair, and
hundreds of others were committed
to flames, amid shouts of idiot delight.By 1936, Jospeh
Paul Goebbels, Germany’s Minister of Propaganda, was issuing
a proclamation
which began with the following words: “ Because this
year has not brought an improvement
in art criticism, I
forbid once and for all the continuance of art
criticism in its past form, effective as of today. ”By 1936,
there was no one left in Germany who had the brains or the courage to object.
Neil
Postman, Conscientious Objections p.163