Important! Read this blog quickly, before you look up difficult words.
To improve your reading skills, it is sometimes a better idea to find the main point of a paragraph, chapter or even the book.
To do this, you could ask say or ask yourself:
- This mainly deals with …
- The main idea may be expressed as …
- The title that best expresses the ideas of this paragraph is …
- The writer wants to tell us that …
- The best name for this story is …
Last month, I gave you part of the opening paragraph of Eva Luna (by Isabel Allende). Here is the first paragraph, again,
but in full. As you read it, try and complete the sentences.
My name is Eva, which means “life,” according to a book of names my mother consulted. I was born in the back room of a
shadowy house, and grew up amidst ancient furniture, books in Latin, and human mummies, but none of those things made me melancholy,
because I came into the world with a breath of the jungle in my memory. My father, an Indian with yellow eyes, came from the place where
the hundred rivers meet; he smelled of lush growing things and he never looked directly at the sky, because he had grown up beneath
a canopy of trees, and light seemed indecent to him. Consuelo, my mother, spent her childhood in an enchanted region where for centuries
adventurers have searched for the city of pure gold the conquistadors saw when they peered into the abyss of their own ambitions.
She was marked forever by that landscape, and in some way she managed to pass that sign on to me. (Allende, published by Knopf, 1988)
This paragraph is a little complicated and, in my opinion, there is more than one idea. Here are my answers. What do you think?
- This mainly deals with an explanation of why Eva is such an unusual person.
- The main idea may be expressed as how it is possible to have a rich and a poor life.
- The title that best expresses the ideas of this paragraph is (perhaps) ‘Drama, Comedy, History’
- The writer wants to tell us that Eva is a good story-teller.
- (One of) the good names for this paragraph is ‘Where I was born’ or ‘My parents.‘
This tells us that there are no wrong answers. Think, read and then think again. |
