Reading: Supporting Details
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Supporting Details go right along with the Main Idea of any work. Where you have a main
idea, you best have supporting details to back it up! When writing academically, this is
especially important. Essentially it can be thought of like this:
As soon as you find the main idea of a sentence, directly afterwards there should be
supporting details - supporting evidence, or pieces of information that can be used to make
the main idea seem more enticing to make you believe that main idea. Identifying these
details is vital when reading a work, especially when one considers that to understand and
believe the main idea, one often needs to understand the supporting evidence behind that
idea.
For instance:
The sun is very hot.
There's the main idea of a paragraph on the sun. What's wrong with it?
Well, nothing, really. As a main idea it's fairly specific, if perhaps somewhat dull. How do we
support it?
Here:
The sun is very hot. According to the Stanford Solar Center, the sun's core is at least ten million
degrees kelvin.
This can give us more perspective! The more supporting detail, the more solid the argument!
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Reading: Supporting Details
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No one really argues that the sun is very hot, but knowing exactly how hot something is will
provide both context and a useful frame of reference!
So how hot is that, exactly?
Well…:
The sun is very hot. According to the Stanford Solar Center, the sun's core is at least 10,000,000
Kelvin. To provide some context, the melting point of tungsten (a pure element with the highest
melting point of any known metal), is 3683.15 K.
Now why would that be? All these supporting details are good, and in order to really cement
in a main idea, having a third one will definitely improve the believability of this piece! The
sun is very hot. How hot is it? What makes that hot? Why is that hot? If these details answer
those questions, it makes it much easier for one to understand that they are supporting
details. The main idea will always be a statement, almost like a theory or an idea. The
supporting details are the facts that back it up, and a fact will always answer a question to
a very specific degree!
So:
The sun is very hot. According to the Stanford Solar Center, the sun's core is at least 10,000,000
Kelvin. To provide some context, the melting point of tungsten (a pure element with the highest
melting point of any known metal), is 3683.15 K. The sun's incredible heat comes mainly from
nuclear fusion, which primarily occurs at the sun's core. The amount of energy given off in a
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Reading: Supporting Details
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nuclear fusion reaction is incredible, and there are potentially hundreds of these reactions
occurring in the sun at any given moment.
Where are the supporting details to the original sentence? They're right after the main
idea! The sun is very hot is followed quickly by According to the Stanford Solar Center, the
sun's core is at least 10,000,000 Kelvin. That's the first detail. Every sentence thereafter contains
another. In this way we can add evidence that makes the main idea make a little more sense.
Well, now that you know a bit more about how hot the sun is, what kind of heat that is and why
the sun is as hot as it is, I think I can introduce the concept of supporting questions:
Suppose you have a main idea, and the main idea is Abraham Lincoln was a good man.
The kinds of supporting questions you might have for that main idea are:
Why was he a good man? (motivation)
Who was Abraham Lincoln? (context)
What did he do? (actions)
How did that make him good? (action repercussions)
When (what time period) was he around? (period context)
When attempting to write supporting details as well as find them, asking these questions of
the main idea - Why, Who, What, How, When - can be incredibly useful.
Supporting details can help you trace the validity of a given source. That is to say, if you
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Reading: Supporting Details
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read a source and it states a main idea like 'The Sun is very hot' and then provides nothing to
back it up… well you know the sun is very hot; that's not the problem! The problem is that even
though you know it, if the source you got that information from uses no supporting facts to back
the information up, how can you be sure they're correct and valid? You can't! Even supporting
details should be checked, as well.
An interesting fact is that supporting details are not just important in academia. You can
find them in novels you might read, as well.
Say you're reading a description of a character.
The author says:
Two-Claw was a very ugly dog.
That doesn't tell us very much. What makes the dog ugly? But a good author will throw us a
bone:
Two-Claw was a very ugly dog. His fur was covered with mange.
That's great, but let's answer a few more questions. That's still a pretty barebones description of a
dog! Why is Two-Claw ugly? How did that happen?
Two-Claw is a very ugly dog. His fur is covered with mange. Pak always figured he'd been
abused as a puppy, and the myriad burns, cuts and breaks that scar Two-Claw's patch-furred
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Reading: Supporting Details
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skin only seem to reinforce that idea as Pak regards him warily.
Why is Two-Claw ugly? He's covered in cuts, burns and breaks, his fur has mange. How
did it happen? He was abused as a puppy. See how these details fit together? It works the
same way as it does in academic writing!
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