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Exercise 2
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Identifying Main Ideas and Modes of Discourse

Identify the mode of discourse in the following paragraphs. Write your answer in the first space. In the second space, write a main-idea sentence using your own words. (Descriptive paragraphs may have a dominant impression rather than a main idea.) The first paragraph is by the great Peruvian writer, Mario Vargas Llosa.



1Amotape is thirty miles south of Talara, surrounded by sun-parched rocks and scorching sand dunes. There are dry bushes, carob thickets, and here and there a eucalyptus tree-pale green patches that brighten the otherwise monotonous gray of the arid landscape. The trees bend over, stretch out and twist around to absorb whatever moisture might be in the air; in the distance they look like dancing witches. In their benevolent shade, herds of squalid goats are always nibbling the crunchy pods that fall off their branches; there are also some sleepy mules and a shepherd, usually a small boy or girl, sunburnt, with bright eyes. --Mario Vargas Llosa, Who Killed Palomino Molero?

In the box below, write the mode of discourse and the main idea or dominant impression.


2N'da Ali [a mountain in Cameroon, a country in West Africa] was the largest mountain in the vicinity. It crouched at our backs, glowering over the landscape, the village, and our little hill. From almost every vantage point you were aware of the mountain's mist-entangled, cloud-veiled shape brooding over everything, its heights guarded by sheer cliffs of gnarled granite so steep that no plant life could get a foothold. Every day I had looked longingly at the summit, and every day I had watched N'da Ali in its many moods. In the early morning it was a great mist-whitened monster; at noon it was all green and golden glitter of forest, its cliffs flushing pink in the sun; at night it was purple and shapeless, fading to black as the sun sank. Sometimes it would go into hiding, drawing the white clouds around itself and brooding in their depths for two or three days at a time. Every day I gazed at those great cliffs that guarded the way to the thick forest on its ridged back, and each day I grew more determined that I would go up there and see what it had to offer me. --Gerald Durrell, The Overloaded Ark

In the box below, write the mode of discourse and the main idea or dominant impression.


3The strangest of all the early American heroes was John Chapman (1774-1845), better known as Johnny Appleseed. If anyone ever exemplified the eccentric trait of obsessive single-mindedness, it was he: he devoted his whole life to the apple, traveling across the country planting countless thousands or millions of apple trees over an area of land estimated to exceed 100,000 square miles. One pioneer who encountered him as he was walking through the Pennsylvania countryside, broadcasting appleseed, described him as "wiry, with long, dark hair and a scanty beard that was never shaved, and keen black eyes that sparkled with a peculiar brightness." He dressed in old coffee sacks with holes cut out for his arms and legs, and went barefoot except in the extreme cold. --David Weeks and Jamie James, Eccentrics: A Study of Sanity and Strangeness

In the box below, write the mode of discourse and the main idea or dominant impression.


4The long June twilight faded into night. (2) Dublin lay enveloped in darkness but for the dim light of the moon that shone through fleecy clouds, casting a pale light as of approaching dawn over the streets and the dark waters of the Liffey. (3) Around the beleaguered Four Courts the heavy guns roared. (4) Here and there through the city, machine guns and rifles broke the silence of the night, spasmodically, like dogs barking on lone farms. (5) Republicans and Free Staters were waging civil war. --Liam O'Flaherty, "The Sniper," Spring Sowing

In the box below, write the mode of discourse and the main idea or dominant impression.





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