Copyright 2001 © Laraine Flemming.
1. Ask students to create their own version of Exercise 1 (pages 247-249). Tell them to start out with general statements like “In fashion at least, the seventies have made a come-back” or “Being around people who are newly in love can be deeply annoying.” They should make up at least five such statements on any topic that interests them. Then ask them to supply at least two supporting details for three of those five statements. Here again, working in groups is quite effective. Students enjoy thinking up details that will fit another classmate’s generalization.
2. In introducing this chapter, I like to stress that understanding the relationship between general and specific sentences is essential to identifying major and minor details. It’s reassuring for students to know that they are building on previously acquired skills, not starting from scratch.
3. I like to repeat the point made on page 253: “ Unlike major details, minor details may or may not be essential to your understanding of a paragraph.” My friend and colleague, Joan Hellman of Catonsville Community College, pointed out in her review of a previous edition that minor details sometimes add important information. If you treat them as permanently expendable, you mislead students into thinking they can always leave minor details out of their notes. A perfect illustration of Joan’s point appears on page 261 under the heading Example. Sentence 9—“It is called the cochlea”—modifies sentence 8 and, therefore, qualifies as a minor detail. But if students were to eliminate that minor detail from their notes, they would probably forget what to call the “small, shell-like organ” mentioned in sentence 8. Determining the importance of minor details is just one more example of what is, to my mind at least, the first rule of reading comprehension: Context is all.
4. The paragraphs in Chapter 6 are pretty schematic with major and minor details neatly separated into different sentences. Tell your students that as the paragraphs they read become more complicated, one sentence might actually contain two major details.
5. I like exercises that ask students to identify an irrelevant supporting detail. This kind of exercise forces students to analyze each supporting detail to figure out if it might be the irrelevant one. In the process, they have to think about the relationship between supporting details and main ideas, which is precisely what makes the exercise so valuable.
Last change made to this page: August 13, 2001
Quiz: Spotting Irrelevant Details
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