To read the paragraphs in your textbooks, for instance, requires reading skills that are different from the one you use to read a TV program, and to read a short story necessitates you to use reading skills that you might never use in dealing with a scientific journal. To be an efficient reader, you should always adjust your reading skills.
This text describex the use of two quick reading skills, skimming and scanning.
1. Skimming
Skimming is to read quickly in order to get the general idea of a passage. In skimming, it is necessary for you to read only selected sentences in order to get the main idea. You should also use textual clues and signals, such as italicized or underlined words, headlines or subtitles, spacing, paragraphing, etc.
By doing such procedure, you will understand the text better. The following are some exercises designed to help you develop your skimming skill that you need to form an idea about the topic of a text just by looking at the title, sub-title and the beginning parts of a text.
2. Scanning
Scanning is to read quickly in order to locate specific information. Every time we look for a particular name, telephone number, date, the atomic weight of cobalt, program, a table, a graph, a menu. TV program or the like, we are scanning. We scan because we are only interested in finding the answer to our questions as quickly and as easily as possible. We are not interested in the whole text.