Summarizing Main Ideas and Details

The main idea is what a paragraph or story is mostly about. It is the one big point that ties all the sentences together. If you took away the main idea, the rest of the text would not make much sense.

Here is an example. Read these three sentences: "Dogs need to be walked every day. Dogs need fresh water and healthy food. Dogs need love and playtime to feel happy." Each sentence is about something different, but they all connect to one big point, taking care of a dog. That connecting point is the main idea.

Supporting details are the smaller facts that explain or prove the main idea. They answer questions like "How do I know that?" or "Can you give an example?" In the dog example, "dogs need to be walked" and "dogs need food and water" are both supporting details for the main idea about caring for a dog.

Look at the picture below. The main idea sits at the top, and three supporting details connect to it from below.

Not every detail is equally important. A supporting detail helps explain the main idea, while a small extra fact, like the color of a dog's collar, is not needed to understand the main point.

A summary is a short retelling of a text using only the most important parts. To write a good summary, follow these steps.

First, read the whole text and find the main idea. Second, pick two or three supporting details that best explain that main idea. Third, put the main idea and the details together in your own words. Do not copy whole sentences from the text, and do not include every small detail you read.

For example, a summary of the dog paragraph could be: "Taking care of a dog means walking it, feeding it, and giving it love." This sentence covers the main idea and the key details, but it is much shorter than the original text.

You can practice this skill with both stories and fact texts. In a story, look for the main event and the two or three details that show what happened. In a fact text, look for the main topic and the two or three facts that explain it. The Summarizing and Synthesizing Texts lesson gives you more practice combining ideas from longer texts once you feel confident with shorter ones.

Main Idea: The big point that a paragraph or story is mostly about.

Supporting Detail: A fact or example that explains or proves the main idea.

Summary: A short retelling of a text that includes only the main idea and its most important details.

Key Detail: A detail that is important enough to include in a summary, as opposed to a small extra fact.

Read a short paragraph and circle the sentence that best states the main idea. Then underline two details that support it. After that, try writing a one or two sentence summary using your own words. Practice with both a story and a fact text so you get comfortable finding main ideas in different kinds of writing.

Related lessons

• Developing Ideas and Summaries