How to Write Better Essays

Practice exercise 7

Reading purposefully

Faced with the following situations, decide which reading strategy would

best suit your purpose.

1 You’re given a 50-page report the night before a conference you’re

attending. Do you skim, scan, or read word-for-word?

2 You’re attending a press conference held by the head of state of a

country which has a very poor record on human rights. To prepare

yourself you refer to a detailed report on the country’s judicial system

compiled by Amnesty International. In particular you want to know

how many political prisoners are at present detained without trial and

the length of time they’ve been in custody. Do you skim, scan, or read

word-for-word?

This underlines again the importance of flexibility in the way we

approach our work. We have three different reading strategies to

choose from, each one appropriate to a different type of job.

1 We can read carefully word-for-wordwhen we’re reading a text

or a passage we know is of central importance to our work, from

which we want to extract in our notes the detailed structure of the

main points and subsections.

2 In contrast, when we just want to pick up the general impression

of the contents, the key ideas and the broad structure of a text or

an article, then we would do better to skimit.

3 And, if we’re just looking for an answer to a specific question, say

a date, a name, a set of figures, or what the writer says about a

certain subject, then we need to scanit.

The key is flexibility and, in turn, the key to this is to read with

a clear purpose in mind, so you can choose the most appropriate

strategy.

80 Research

Continued

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