Develop The Skill of Skimming

Remember the last time you looked something up in the phone book. You looked for the name and didn’t read any more than was necessary. You might even have used your finger to guide your eyes. We call this type of reading scanning. We do it everyday with book indexes, dictionaries, etc. Another type of reading is skimming. It uses the same type of skill mechanically as scanning but a different skill mentally. The difference is with scanning you know what you are looking for and, with skimming you don’t.

Because of everything we have to read, learning to skim material is getting more important all the time. There always seems to be a never ending supply of material like manuals, proposals, and news stories but less and less time to read them.

Since you don’t know exactly what you are looking for, first read the title, source, author, and look at any pictures.
Then ask yourself four questions.
1) Who is this piece likely to be focused on?
2) What is this piece likely to be focused on?
3) When is this piece likely to have taken place?
4) Where is this piece likely to have taken place?
Next; with these questions in mind, direct your eyes down the column of print. Clues to who and what can be found by looking for names of people, places, things, ideas, numbers. Clues to how and why are gotten from words like therefore, whenever, until, because, and instead.

When you first learn skimming you may only pay attention to the words in bold type, italics, digits, or capitalized words. This is natural but, you will soon come to see new or unusual vocabulary, so that as you become an efficient skimmer your span of perception will develop and your ability to make connections will increase.

Make skimming a step you always take before you read any article of factual or practical material. Skim everything you intend to read before you make a final decision whether to read, discard, or study the material. You will soon be able to detect the most important facts, strange vocabulary, and words that are clues to important relationships.

It's a good idea to skim everything in mass media. This keeps your skimming ability sharp and also keeps the necessary skills from deteriorating. Aside from practice, you may even find after going over the title and first paragraph, you have gotten all the information you need or want.

Finally, develop a read-skim pattern to use for rapid review. Reviewing frequently and rapidly is the best way to remember information from notes or long text materials. Skimming is a very useful tool for studying, so learn it and use it!