Diagrams of the Main Ideas and Exercises on Finding the Main Idea: The University of Minnesota’s Counseling and Consulting Services has posted a number of useful handouts on the reading process, among them a description of diagrams that describe paragraph structure, and a sheet of Exercises allowing practice of a) finding the main idea and b) diagramming the paragraph structure.

1		EXERCISE: First, consult the explanation of diagrams; then try the exercises. (You’ll want to print out either the downloadable PDF version of the exercises, or the HTML version.) How did you do? Do you find diagramming helpful? Click here for answers (24.0K) to the Exercises.