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Skimming
Knowing what you want to obtain from your reading material is crucial for effective speed reading (great timing plus great
comprehension). Depending on the type of material you have to read, you will need to adjust your reading speed. While most light narratives don’t require a high concentration or meticulous focus when reading, many technical documents do. It all depends on how accurately- and how much- you want to comprehend of what’s in front of you. Once you clearly identify and define your objectives from a particular session, you can choose how quickly you should go through it.
Skimming is a speed reading technique that emphasizes differentiating between what’s important in any given text- and what’s not. As discussed in the second lesson, a lot of times you will come across blocks of text- sentences paragraphs and even a page or two!- which are not essential to the main point. With practice, you can get better at identifying what blocks of text you can skip over, which ones you can just flit through and which ones you should read carefully.
Understanding the way most text is structured is very useful to the skimming technique. Most text is organized in the following manner (and in this exact order):
- Background/Introduction
- Body text
- Conclusion
You should always read the introduction of an article (or other reading material) as it gives you a comprehensive idea of what the entire thing is going to be about. Similarly, the conclusion reinforces the most important points made in the paragraphs preceding it. It’s the body that usually has a lot of detail and specifics that are not as essential to your understanding of what the article is about. However, don’t forget that it all depends on what you want from your reading- if it’s just an outline of the text, you can skim through the body. But if what you need is complete comprehension (especially if it’s of a technical or mathematical document), you will need to read the body more much more slowly and carefully.
Finally, here are a few tips that will help make you a pro-skimmer:
- A useful skimming roadmap comes in the shapes of formatted text – bolded words and phrases, headings etc- that you should definitely read as they give you a good idea of the important points made in the text.
- Vision Expansion and Clumping techniques, as discussed earlier, are really effective when skimming. The more you are able to see in an instant, the more you can skim through! So if you practice those techniques a lot, they will also help you with skimming through documents.
- Pre-reading can go a long way in helping you make sense of what you read- and knowing what parts of it to skim through. Knowing things about the reading material- such as its topic, its author, its publication date etc.- can all indicate whether what you want to know is contained within the pages or not.
Tip: Also check out Speed Reading Techniques for some other great strategies.
