Main Idea
Students in my classes have been writing summary paragraphs. They describe the experience as “tedious,” “frustrating,” and “boring.”
Yesterday, I gave them the task of unraveling the main idea of an essay by David McCullough: “Why History?” I said, “Think of this exercise as a problem to solve—an equation. It should be hard. it should be frustrating.”
The simple main idea of McCullough’s essay is this: “We cheat ourselves when we don’t know our history.” Yet the students kept writing long, drawn out, poorly constructed sentences. I kept asking questions, prodding them along to really look at the what the essay was trying to do.
Finally, two pairs came up with a close approximation of the main idea—still a little overwritten: “Our great ignorance in America is that we don’t know our history”—something to that effect.
When I asked students why coming up with a main idea was such a difficult task, they answered this way: “There is just so much information in the essay, and we don’t know how to get it all into one sentence.”
And then it hit me: this notion of a thesis statement or main idea or whatever we want to call it—is a hard concept to explain; even though, in its essence, it is simple. When the students finally realized the main idea, one of them said, “But that’s so simple. I thought a thesis had to be complex.”
We are spending a lot of time working on the main idea. Some educators would say, “They should already know this stuff.” But I think, if I slow down and really get them to see how to simplify a text, that will take them further than continually writing papers that miss the point and lose their way in unwieldy constructions and repetitive thought.
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