The set of ideas we use can be divided into two blocks: primary and secondary. The first are essential and define the fundamental aspect of a concrete reality . The secondary ones, on the other hand, are ancillary and hierarchically depend on the primary ones.
Secondary ideas in text analysis
A text literary , scientific or any other kind has a main idea. And this main idea is the central thesis of something.
Within a novel you can present the following main idea: two young people from different social classes fall in love and face all kinds of difficulties. From this idea arises a series of secondary ideas within the novel, such as the most varied conflicts existing between lovers and their personal concerns.
If we take journalistic news as a reference, the headline would express the main idea and the arguments that were concerned with defending it would form the secondary ideas
In a document , in the academic context, the student must distinguish between primary and secondary ideas. For this, you can use different strategies such as text underlining or concept maps.
In any text, the relationship between primary and secondary ideas must maintain coherence and cohesion. It can be said that a text is coherent when the meaning of its paragraphs is organized and related in a logical and meaningful way. Coherence can be achieved through keyword repetition or using appropriate synonyms. A text is said to have cohesion when the primary and secondary ideas flow correctly in the paragraphs. For a text to be understood, it is essential that there is a combination of coherence and cohesion.
From a grammatical point of view, the main clauses of a text represent the primary ideas and the secondary clauses refer to the secondary ideas.
In understanding the events
In addition to texts, we organize reality in our minds based on the distinction between the main idea and the secondary idea. It can be said that the main idea is the “what” and the secondary idea is the “how”. Let’s imagine the scene of a crime. The investigator needs to observe what appears at the scene and under what conditions, in a secondary way must reconstruct how could the facts be.
In Western philosophy, ideas are organized following the scheme of primary and secondary. Aristotle explained the reality of a thing by differentiating substance from accidents, and empiricist philosophers distinguished between simple and complex ideas.
