Defining Words

1. Main Idea: The central, or most important, idea in a paragraph or passage.
2. Supporting Details: Are facts and secondary ideas that an author uses to develop and sopport the main idea.
3. Context Clues: The sentence, paragraph, or passage that surround a word and make it meaningful.
4. Authors Purpose: Determine whether the story or article is written for information (to give facts), for entertainment (for your enjoyment), or to persuade (make you think a certain thing).
5. Organizational Pattern: Ideas in some clearly organized way.
6. Fact and Opinion: Facts is based on direct evidence, actual experience, or observation and opinion is a statement that expresses an author's beliefs, judgements, and values.
7. Bias: A predisposition, prejudice, or prejudgment; bias may be in favor or against something or someone.
8. Tone: Is the attitutde or feeling he creates in writing about his subject; the reader can recognize a mood or feeling in written material in the same way as he would recognize a mood or feeling from a speaker's tone of voice.
9. Relationship within Sentences: A contrast between parts of a sentence.
10. Relationships between Sentences: A difference between parts of a sentence.
11. Valid Arguments: A statement that fits into a logical pattern of reasoning and/or which makes use of revelant, verifiable proof to support a particular conclusion.
12. Inference and Conclusions: Is that a reader thinks the writer is suggesting through the words or ideas presented, because he can assume things that are not ddirectly stated by the author.