Read to learn about Reading for supporting details.

In B2U2, we learned how to read for major details in a paragraph. Sometimes, however, the author may provide details to support his idea without differentiating the levels of importance of those details. In other words, the supporting details in a paragraph may be parallel or equally important. In this unit, we will focus on how to identify supporting details in general.

There are two clues that can help us to locate the supporting details in a paragraph:

1 Sentence position: Sentences that contain supporting details often come after the sentence that states the main idea of the paragraph, i.e. the topic sentence.

2 Specific information: Supporting details usually consist of specific and concrete information, e.g. facts, statistics, examples and anecdotes (轶事), rather than general or abstract ideas.

Take the following paragraph from Text A as an example:

When I was a boy growing up off the grid in the Commonwealth of Virginia, the men I knew labored with their bodies from the first rooster crow in the morning to sundown. They were marginal farmers, shepherds, just scraping by, or welders, steelworkers, carpenters; they built cabinets, dug ditches, mined coal, or drove trucks, their forearms thick with muscle. They trained horses, stocked furnaces, made tires, stood on assembly lines, welding parts onto refrigerators and lubricating car engines. In the evenings and on weekends, they labored equally hard, working on their own small tract of land, fixing broken-down cars, repairing broken shutters and drafty windows. In their little free time, they drowned their livers in beer from cheap copper mugs at a bar near the local brewery or racecourse. (Para. 1)

In this paragraph, the author states his main idea in the first sentence, i.e. the men he knew labored with their bodies all day. All the other sentences, starting from the second one until the last one, function as supporting details that explain this idea. They give specific examples and descriptions to show that these men's life was hard.

Read to learn how to support an argument with personal experiences and observations

In writing an argumentative essay, the author needs to provide specific details to support his opinion. These details can be of various kinds, for instance, statistics, facts, examples, and quotes from authorities. Personal experiences and observations are also a common type of evidence to support an argument. They often involve the author's own impressions about or memories of a person, thing, place, or situation. For instance, if you are writing an essay to argue for one particular learning style, your supporting details can be your own experience as a student or your observations of those around you who have learned better in that style than in other styles.

Text A of this unit is characterized by the use of the author's personal observations to support his opinion about gender inequality. To refute some women's view that men have more joys and privileges, the author gives evidence by describing vividly the hard work men did as seen through his own eyes. The rich facts taken from his own observations make his point straightforward and convincing.

Take Paragraph 5 for example.

… Here for the first time I met women who told me that men were guilty of having kept all the joys and privileges of the earth for themselves. I was puzzled, and demanded clarification. What privileges? What joys? I thought about the grim, wounded lives of most of the men back home. What had they allegedly stolen from their wives and daughters? The right to work five days a week, 12 months a year, for 30 or 40 years, wedged in tight spaces in the textile mills, or in the coal mines, struggling to extract every last bit of coal from the rock-hard earth? The right to die in war? The right to fix every leak in the roof, every gap in the fence? The right to pile banknotes high for a rich corporation in a city far away? The right to feel, when the lay-off came or the mines shut down, not only afraid but also ashamed?

In this paragraph, the author thinks that women's grievances were puzzling because in his eyes men, as workers in textile mills or coal mines, soldiers, etc. in fact carried the burden of hard labor and lived "grim, wounded lives".

In conclusion, personal experiences and observations are effective supporting details in writing an argumentative essay. Through specific descriptions of what he sees, does and feels, the author can make his point clear and convincing in a direct and forceful way.