Reading Comprehension Success in 20 Minutes a Day, 3rd Edition

Skill Building until Next Time

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1 1 7
Reading between
the Lines
N
ow that you’ve studied the way authors use structure and language to
organize and express their ideas, you’re ready to tackle more difficult pas-
sages: those in which the writers don’t provide clear topic sentences or do
not clearly indicate their intentions. To understand this type of text, you have to “read
between the lines.” This means you have to really put your observation skills to use and
scour the passage for clues to meaning. Like Sherlock Holmes, you will really have to notice
what you see.
By the end of this section, you should be able to:
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Determine an implied main idea
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Determine an implied cause or effect
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Distinguish between logical and emotional appeals
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Determine the theme of a piece of literature
You’ll look at a variety of texts, including some literature, and then put it all together
in a review lesson.

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O
h, the power of suggestion. Advertisers know it well—and so do writers. They know that they can
get an idea across to their readers without directly saying it. Instead of providing a topic sentence
that expresses their main idea, many times, they simply omit that sentence and instead provide
a series of clues through structure and language to get their ideas across.
Finding an implied main idea is much like finding a stated main idea. If you recall from Lesson 2, a main
idea is defined as an assertion about the subject that controls or holds together all the ideas in the passage. There-
fore, the main idea must be general enough to encompass all the ideas in the passage. Much like a net, it holds
everything in the passage together. So far, all but one of the passages in this book have had a topic sentence that
stated the main idea, so finding the main idea was something of a process of elimination: You could eliminate
the sentences that weren’t general enough to encompass the whole passage. But what do you do when there’s no
topic sentence?
You use your observations to make an inference—this time, an inference about the main idea or point of
the passage.