A Guide To College Reading - Chap. 7

Before reading this chapter I already knew much about this topic. Since I recently have taken a Writing 100 class, as a prerequisite, I'm familiar with details and transitions in a paragraph. After reading this chapter I learned that a paragraph has four essential elements, which are: a topic, a main idea, supporting details, and transitions.

Supporting details are basically facts and ideas that prove or explain the main idea of a paragraph. Even though details support the main idea, they are not at all that important. The important details are, key details, which directly explain the main idea. There are five most common types of supporting details, which happen to be: examples, facts or statistics, reasons, descriptions and steps. Using examples make ideas real and understandable. Facts or Statistics provide evidence to the reader that the main idea is correct. Reasons are used by writers who show the readers why a main idea is correct. Descriptions are deals that help create a mental picture of the object described. Lastly, steps are used when the writer explains how to do something in a paragraph.

The last thing that I learned about in the chapter was a broader definition of the term transitions. Transitions are linking words or phrases used to lead the reader from one idea to another. Also, I learned that paraphrasing paragraphs is a useful technique for both building and checking your comprehension. This involves substituting synonyms and rearranging sentence parts.