Am I missing out if I just read summaries to save time yet still get the main ideas?
Much of the art of writing/persuasion is not stating the essential ideas, but elaborating them and making them persuasive through examples and discussion. A summary will often omit evidence and peripheral details that, while they do not change the essential ideas, reinforce them and drive them home.Michael Pollan's Unhappy Meals in the New York Times Magazine http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/2... is an interesting case of this. It begins:Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy. I hate to give away the game right here at the beginning of a long essay, and I confess that I’m tempted to complicate matters in the interest of keeping things going for a few thousand more words. I’ll try to resist but will go ahead and add a couple more details to flesh out the advice. He expanded the NYTMag essay into an even longer version, the book In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto. The seven-word summary "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." really, truly, and effectively does summarize everything a person needs to do to eat healthy. But that summary is only really practical, actionable, if you've read more than that. Reading more than that allows you to understand that "food" means unprocessed/whole foods. To understand how much serving sizes have ballooned in the US in the past century, and why, and why "eating less" really means "eating quantities that are nutritionally normal". Etc. These details and anecdotes support the main ideas by making them more concrete in your mind, and therefore easier to remember and apply later.Rhetoric and vivid anecdotes can be, and often are, abused to convince people of things that are not true. But they also can be essential to drive home points that really make things memorable. The most important thing that a summary should do is throw out details in order to whittle down a longer work to its essential arguments. But a skeletal framework of "main ideas" is feeble and unpersuasive, not to mention much harder to remember. If you really want to learn from something, read the work itself and not a summary.
What's the central idea of "THE CANTERBURY TALES" by Geoffrey Chaucer ?
Geoffrey Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales, a collection of stories in a frame story, between 1387 and 1400. It is the story of a group of thirty people who travel as pilgrims to Canterbury (England). The pilgrims, who come from all layers of society, tell stories to each other to kill time while they travel to Canterbury. If we trust the General Prologue, Chaucer intended that each pilgrim should tell two tales on the way to Canterbury and two tales on the way back. He never finished his enormous project and even the completed tales were not finally revised. Scholars are uncertain about the order of the tales. As the printing press had yet to be invented when Chaucer wrote his works, The Canterbury Tales has been passed down in several handwritten manuscripts.
Does a non-fiction book have a THEME or a THESIS?
Is it too late to change your book to a fiction book or short story? Since your book is based on opinion, you may be able to call his main point - how today's society is destroying and poisoning young girls - the writer's theme. Just be specific, what about society is destroying ..? But my first choice would be to find an interesting short story, read it quick, identify the theme (central idea), write a summary paragraph, identify the problem and resolution, analyze a few characters, discuss how setting effects characterization, look up a few critical analysis on school library database (be sure to quote and cite properly), include personal reflection, and conclude with how theme was important to the story. This is a two-hour minimum project but use a good story by a writer easy to understand. Can't suggest any, don't know your grade level.
Does the main idea and summary writing mean the same thing?
No, it doesn't. I already answered this: let me rummage around...I can't find it. This is the main idea: Finding the Main Idea by Loretta B DeLoggio on LSAT Notes, Tips and Practice A summary includes the important facts that got us to the main idea.
What are the differences between theme, thesis statement, topic sentence and main idea in essay writing?
In essay writing, theme and topic are very closely related. If there's a difference between them, it lies in the distinction between whether they are explicitly discussed or simply present in the writing. A topic is the what is being talked about. For example, in an essay on income inequality between genders (the topic), the differences between pay will be discussed directly. A similar essay discussing differences between genders in the workplace might describe how a male and a female might earn different amounts in different situations, but might not directly state such a difference. The theme of pay difference would still be present. Both essays would contain the same idea as a theme, but in the latter it might not be considered a topic since it is not actually talked about directly.The main idea of an essay is the main point which the essay is attempting to get across, a more specific idea than a theme or topic. For example, one essay on gender inequality in the workplace might argue "women receiving less pay is a social injustice that needs to be corrected" while another essay might argue that "people of different genders receiving different pay is more a product of differences in social and biological roles than due to sexism." While both essays would include the theme/topic of pay differences, their main idea would be strikingly different.A thesis statement is a main idea with the characteristics of making a specific argument. Not all main ideas are arguments, such as describing how domestic cats are similar to lions in behavior. No argument is being made, so the main idea is not a thesis.In this answer, both the theme and topic are "the differences between topic, theme, and main ideas" while the main idea would could be summarized as "theme and topic are closely related with only a slight difference, while a main idea is a specific statement about the topic that the author wants to make."