LSAT Reading Comprehension: Main Idea, Scope & Tone

If you are lucky, the passage will follow a traditional essay structure and the author will explicitly state the main idea near the beginning of the passage, most likely in the first paragraph. Think back to when you first learned how to write an essay with a thesis statement, supporting sentences and a conclusion. That thesis statement that comes before everything else is the main idea. It most likely won’t be the first sentence because quality writers use this space to engage the reader in the topic. But the thesis or main idea will definitely be clear before you get too far.

Other authors never state the main idea. These types of passages build the main idea piece by piece, each paragraph leading into the other until it becomes clear in the final paragraph. Here you will have to come up with a sentence on your own summarizing the whole passage. If you briefed the passage by making good summary notes in the margins, this shouldn’t be too difficult. But there are two other elements of the passage (that you also should have noted while briefing the passage) that will help you define the main idea.

You should be able to identify the subject of the passage fairly easily from the first paragraph, if not the first sentence, because it’s the one thing the author keeps mentioning over and over. But scope can be a little bit trickier. It helps to think about the scope as a stepping stone between the subject and the main idea. For example, the subject of a passage is the work of Amos Tutuola. The author wants to discuss the opinion a certain group of literary critics holds regarding Tutuola’s work. This is the scope of the passage. The main idea is a narrowly tailored point the author makes regarding these critics’ collective opinion: “The most useful approach to [critiquing] Tutuola’s works, then, is one that regards him as working within the African oral tradition.”

Keeping the scope in mind can help you on a number of question types, specifically Infer Broad questions and Gist questions (such as main point or purpose questions). The correct answer to Gist questions will fit neatly inside the scope, like your foot inside your shoe. It won’t include aspects of the subject outside the scope (like the influence of Tutuola’s work on other authors), ignore any aspect the author covers (like the characteristics of a folktale), or falsely attribute a view point to the author (numerous translations won’t affect the integrity of Tutuola’s work).
With Infer Broad questions, the scope of the passage can help you identify inferences that are too broad or too narrow to be correct. For example, imagine a question asks you to find the inference best supported by the information in the passage on fractal geometry. The correct answer won’t make claims outside the scope (about mathematical theory in general) or claims that don’t fill the scope (that fractal geometry will have practical applications in the future, which doesn’t include the opposing view that the theory will not be useful).

Often, scope is defined and used as a limiting criteria in the prompt. For example, an Infer Broad question containing the phrase “most likely to agree” might be asking with which statement is the author is most likely to agree. Or, more narrowly, it might refer to one side of the debate that the author discussed in the passage, such as “enthusiastic practitioners of fractal geometry.” Keeping the scope of the prompt in mind when analyzing the question and answer choices will help you not only avoid misleading answer choices but also identify correct answer choices faster.