Ways to Analyze the Main Point of a Reading
by Kathleen M.
It is time to start learning a few shortcuts to help you in reading and writing for college. When you read, if you take notes, you will be better able to remember the details of what you read.
This is important because not only will it help you with readings in college classes, it will also help you to understand your own point in your writing, such as when revising and editing your personal story in your college application essays.
Learning how to annotate what you read is a skill to develop and practice no matter what you are reading. Annotating allows you to note what you know and don’t know as you read.
You might mark words to look up later, write questions where you have them, notice emotions that you are experiencing. All of these details will help you to become both a better writer and reader.
Questions you could ask as you read:
What is the question this essay is addressing? What is the thesis of this essay?
Who is the intended audience for this essay?
What is the author’s purpose in writing this essay?
Is the evidence credible and evident?
Does each paragraph have a clear relationship to the main point?
What are the essays’ strengths and weaknesses?
As a sample, I have pulled a paragraph by Lewis Thomas from an article on marginalian.org:
We tend to think of our selves as the only wholly unique creations in nature, but it is not so. Uniqueness is so commonplace a property of living things that there is really nothing at all unique about it. A phenomenon can’t be unique and universal at the same time. Even individual, free-swimming bacteria can be viewed as unique entities, distinguishable from each other even when they are the progeny of a single clone.
Questions I might ask in order to understand the sample better:
- What does unique mean?
- What does progeny mean?
- Is it possible that I have confused exceptional and unique as words?
- What is this essay saying about “selves” and our perception of ourselves?
As you read more and learn more about how to analyze the main point of a reading, you will find ways in which to use the comment function in word, or different color type, or highlighting in order to literally play with the text as you read it. Using these ways to analyze the main point of a reading will help you to understand what you read, and will offer you a full complement of tools to use when you are writing.
