عمومی در برابر خاص

Structuring Answers - General vs. Specific

In order to structure your answers well, you need to use both general ideas and specific details. So, let’s take a look at those general and specific statements and how they’re related. You’re going to in most answers have main idea and then some details. I outlined this in an earlier lesson.

Now, how do you move between them? Well, this is general at the beginning and these are specific and then the conclusion is more general again. That seems clear, but what about inside a single part? What do you do to structure a detail? So, let’s take a look within a detail.

Inside that, you would transition from the main idea and then give some specific information and then use the main idea to transition to the third part to the next detail. So you have here the same kind of general, specific, general structure that we did in the overall structure. So, what you’re doing is sandwiching the specific details with general statements.

So if you take an example like this, you would start off by giving a general statement about your opinions and then some details about why. So, these are all details here and then we have more details about why down here. But if you look at these individual sentences, we see something more. So in the beginning, I have a very general phrase.

Whereas a lot of people don’t get very passionate about the subjects we studied in high school, I really enjoyed some of them. So that answers the general question not much, I enjoyed some subjects. Notice so general and then this gets more specific, but it’s still just answering the question. It’s not giving any details that explain it.

So in particular, I enjoyed studying math. Great, answer to the question. Now here, we have explanations for why. And then after that, I suppose why I preferred to some other subjects and so we’re back to the other subjects. We’re back to the general statement about preferring math and then we say, I prefer it to chemistry.

So, I prefer math. This is really just returning to the big idea of what I like best. I appreciate the math, because and now we’re in another detail. Here we have some more explanation about the reasons and then in the end, I return to the general idea that I am happy about learning math. So really, we have glue.

We have these big statements in the middle that connect the details, they connect the reasons. So these kinds of ideas I enjoyed studying math, that is why I enjoyed math. That is why I prefer it. I prefer it to chemistry. And then in the middle, you have the explanations and the details and the examples.

So keep returning to the more general ideas, so you can more smoothly transition from one detail to the next detail.