If one of your friends announces that he’s reading an article about cooking, he is referring to the article’s topic. The topic is what a text is about, such as life after the Civil War, or sweet basketball moves, or newly-released video games. Once you have identified the topic of article, you can focus on its main idea--the broadest message that the author hopes to convey.
Question
You probably have some knowledge already about how to find the main idea of an article or essay. Where should you look first?
Once you have identified the overall topic and main idea of a text, you should begin to notice some supporting details. In an informational article, supporting ideas tend to elaborate on the main idea, adding facts, examples, and other details that help readers understand the article’s key point. Read the first section of “Without Independence, Freedom Is Just a Word.” As you read, see if you can identify both the topic and the main idea.
Imagine you're an African American farmer living in Mississippi in the 1930s. Your grandparents were most likely slaves, but you were born after emancipation. You live in a tiny, shabby cabin and work a small plot of land to grow cotton. You would rather grow vegetables to eat and to sell, but your landlord gets to decide what crop you will grow. He also requires--as a condition of the lease--that you sell your crops only to him. Your whole family works long days, first planting, then tending, and finally harvesting the cotton. You hope to make enough money from the sale to buy food and other necessities in the year ahead. If you're lucky, you’ll have a little extra money to put aside. However, the entire country is in the midst of the Great Depression, and the price of cotton has fallen sharply. Moreover, your landlord has set a price for your cotton that is unfairly low. After you harvest your crop, settle up with the landlord, and pay your bills, you find yourself left with less than nothing, which means you’ll begin the next planting cycle in debt. You’re a free person, according to the Constitution, but you’re also a farmer without a farm. You are a sharecropper.
Sharecropping as a system developed in the ruins of the post-Civil-War South. Long before the war, America’s southern states had built booming economies based on agriculture. Wealthy southern landowners ran large plantations where they grew tobacco, sugar, rice, and most of all, cotton. The success of those crops depended on the use of enslaved Africans for labor. The southern Confederacy’s defeat in the Civil War brought an end to the shameful practice of slavery and marked the beginning of the end of the plantations. Other farming practices had to take their place, and newly freed slaves needed a way to support themselves and their families. To many, sharecropping seemed like a solution.
Question
What is this article’s main idea? What words in the passage provided the biggest clue?
You’re a free person, according to the Constitution, but you’re also a farmer without a farm. You are a sharecropper.
The southern Confederacy’s defeat in the Civil War brought an end to the shameful practice of slavery and marked the beginning of the end of the plantations. Other farming practices had to take their place, and newly freed slaves needed a way to support themselves and their families. To many, sharecropping seemed like a solution.
