Effective Reading Techniques: Skimming

• Reading is a complex cognitive process to decode symbols to understand their meaning, and share information.
• Technique involves doing something by using special knowledge or skill.
• Reading techniques involve styles, systems, or practices to decode symbols for better comprehension, communication, and sharing of ideas.

Skimming

• Skimming involves rapidly moving the eyes over text to get the main ideas and a general overview.
• Skimming is more thorough than previewing and can give a more accurate idea of the text.
• Skimming is helpful for reviewing texts that have already been read.
• Skimming is used to quickly understand material that doesn't need detailed information.

Steps to Skim an Article

• Read the title.
• Read the introduction or lead-in paragraph.
• Read the first paragraph completely.
• When reading subheadings, look for relationships between them.
• Read the first sentence of each remaining paragraph because the main idea of most paragraphs is in the first sentence.
• If the author uses a question or anecdote, you may find the last sentence offers more value.

Scanning

• Scanning quickly covers a lot of material to find certain facts or information.
• Scanning is useful for finding items like a name, date or statistic without reading the full article.

Steps in Scanning an Article

• Keep the image of what to search for in mind, to make it easier to locate.
• Anticipate the format of the information like numbers, proper nouns, etc.
• Before scanning, analyze the layout and formatting of the content.
• For familiar or short material, you may be able to scan the whole article in one search.
• Scan to determine what parts of the article to scan, if the material is lengthy or difficult
• Run your eyes over lines of print and read the full sentence when information is found.

Phrase Reading

• Phrase reading involves an individuals focus on phrases.
• A phrase is a group of words that together to mean something and create a concept.
• Clustering is a simple exercise to develop these skills.
• Eye muscles can be quickly trained to phrase read by correctly practicing for 10-20 minutes a day, most likely learning the skill in roughly three weeks.

Non-Prose Reading

• Non-prose materials/graphics use visuals summarizing information through words, symbols, pictures, and drawings.

Types of Graphic Materials

• Graphs visually represent quantitative data to help the reader see the relationships, for example, bar, pie, line graphs and pictographs.
• Diagrams use lines and symbols to show the relationships of parts, steps, or key object features, such as tree charts, timelines, technical/process diagrams
• Charts summarize data, explain a process, or describe a set of relationships, for example, tabular, outline, or organizational charts.
• Maps show geographical areas through scales and models.