Think of it this way: The main idea of a paragraph or segment of text is a major idea expressed in that portion only. The theme is an idea that continues throughout the text; it can be considered to be the moral of the story.
As a reader, you need to prepare your brain to discover the theme or main idea — that is, warm up your thinking ability before you take on the task. What can you do? Ask yourself these questions:
- If the piece has a title, does it give you a clue about the theme or main idea?
- Do you know anything about the topic?
- What do you expect to learn from reading this piece?
- What does the graphic information (pictures, tables, graphs) tell you about the theme or main idea?
Identifying main ideas
A useful strategy to help you identify the main idea is to look for a topic sentence. This sentence usually tells you what a paragraph is about and, therefore, may contain the main idea. For example:Small dogs make wonderful companions for the elderly. They are easy to walk, they are loving, they like to sit on their masters' laps, and they don't eat a lot of food. They are very loyal to the person who feeds and cares for them. Often, they will warn an elderly person if someone is at the door and make the person feel safer in his own home.To find the topic sentence, ask yourself, "What is this paragraph about?"
If you said the first sentence, "Small dogs make wonderful companions for the elderly," you are correct. Can you see that this topic sentence provides you with the main idea of the paragraph?
Identifying themes
Now that you've mastered finding the main idea, you can begin to look further into your reading for themes. The theme can be a message the author is trying to get across. You may have heard of the "moral of the story." That's the theme the author wants to convey. For example:Stephen told his mother he was going to stay at his friend John's house for the night. Instead, he went to visit his friend in college in the next state over. While he was driving to his friend's dorm on campus, he was stopped by a police officer for speeding. The officer told Stephen that he was going to have to contact his parents because he was a minor. Stephen's first thought was, "Boy, am I in trouble now!"What would you say is the message or theme the author is trying to convey?
Is it that you shouldn't drive too fast? That you shouldn't visit a friend in another state? Would you say that the theme might be that you shouldn't lie? Right! The theme here is that lying is the wrong thing to do.