Summarizing Major and Minor Details

Learning Objectives

  • Identify strategies to distinguish a text’s major claims from minor ones

The following presentation offers advice about distinguishing major ideas in a text from minor ones.  When you’re asked to write a summary of something you read, you’ll want to focus only on the major ideas, since minor ideas aren’t generally included in summaries.

On slide 6, can you identify which are the major ideas of the paragraph, and which are the minor ones?