Finding main idea 6 pdf

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t’s a scientifically proven fact: People remember most what they learn first and last in a given session. Writ￾ers have instinctively known this for a long time. That’s why many pieces of writing are organized not in

chronological order but by order of importance.

Imagine again that the writer is like an architect. How would this type of writer arrange the rooms? By hier￾archy. A hierarchy is a group of things arranged by rank or order of importance. In this type of organizational pat￾tern, hierarchy, not chronology, determines order. Thus, this architect would lay the rooms out like so: When you

walk in the front door, the first room you encounter would be the president’s office, then the vice president’s, then

the assistant vice president’s, and so on down to the lowest ranking worker. Or, vice versa, the architect may choose

for you to meet the least important employee first, the one with the least power in the company. Then the next,

and the next, until at last, you reach the president.

Likewise, in writing, ideas may be arranged in order of importance. In this pattern, which idea comes first?

Not the one that happened first, but the one that is most, or least, important.

LESSON

Order of

Importance

LESSON SUMMARY

Continuing your study of the structure of reading material, this lesson

shows you how writers use order of importance—from least to most

important or from most to least important. Understanding this commonly

used structure improves your reading comprehension by helping you

see what’s most important in a piece of writing.

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