A brief digression: Most everyone I know confuses “skim” and “scan.”
Let me set the record straight. Skim is to read quickly and superficially.
Scan is to read carefully but for a specific item. So when you skim a
reading selection, you are reading it in its entirety, though you’re only
hitting the “highlights.” When you scan a selection, you are reading
it in detail but only until you find what you’re looking for. Scanning is
the fastestreading rate of all—although you are reading in detail, you
are notseeking to comprehend or remember anything that you see
until you find the bit of information you’re looking for.
You probably are assigned a lot of reading that can be accomplished
by skimming for facts. By establishing the questions you want
answered beforeyou begin to read, you can quickly browse through
the material, extracting only the information you need.
Let’s say you’re reading a science book with the goal of identifying the
function of a cell’s nucleus. You can breeze through the section that
gives the parts of the cell. You can skim the description of what cells
do. You already know what you’re looking for—and there it is in the
section that talks about what each cell part does. Now you can start
to read.
By identifying the questions you wanted to answer (a.k.a.your
purpose) in advance, you would be able to skim the chapter and
answer your questions in a lot less time than it would have taken to
painstakingly read every word.
Skimming, or prereading, is a valuable step even if you aren’t seeking
specific facts. When skimming for a general overview, there’s a very
simple procedure to follow:
1.If there is a title or heading, rephrase it as a question. This will
be your purpose for reading.
2.Examine all the subheadings, illustrations, and graphics, as
these will help you identify the significant matter within the
text.Chapter 3 ■How to Read and Remember 51