English Language Arts and Literacy | Grade : 11-12
Strand - Reading Literature
Cluster - Key Ideas and Details
[RL.11-12.2] - Determine two or more themes or central ideas of a text and analyze their development over the course of the text, including how they interact and build on one another to produce a complex account; provide an objective summary of the text.
- Main/central idea
Concept illustrated or position taken by a text as a whole, whether stated explicitly (as in a how-to guide explaining a process or an essay defending a thesis) or conveyed implicitly (as in a novel or collection of short stories illustrating a theme). - Massachusetts Anchor Standards for Reading
- Summary
An account of a text’s main points, disregarding unimportant details and usually employing the same order of events or topics as the source text. Summarizing is a basic reading technique that consolidates and demonstrates understanding of a text’s overall meaning. See Synthesis. - Theme
Central message or abstract concept made concrete through representation in a literary text. Like a thesis, a theme implies a subject and predicate of some kind: for instance, not just vice as a standalone word, but a proposition such as Vice seems more interesting than virtue but turns out to be destructive. Sometimes a theme is directly stated in a work, and sometimes it is revealed indirectly. A single work may have more than one theme. See Main idea, Moral.
[RL.11-12.8] -
(Not applicable. For expectations regarding central messages or lessons in stories, See Reading Literature Standard 2.)