When you are skimming, be sure to move rapidly through the material, skipping the information you are already familiar with. You may wish to read the
first and the last sentences of each paragraph because that is often where the main ideas are located. Read the introduction and the summary if one is provided.
When examples are given, you may want to read a few of them until you understand the concepts they are meant to illustrate. When skimming a textbook
chapter, glance quickly at the title, subheadings, italicized words, boldface print, and illustrations.
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5. Skills in Reading a. Predictive Skill
The efficient reader predicts what he is going to read and the process of understanding the text is the process of seeing how the content of the text matches
up to these predictions. In the first instance his predictions will be the result of the expectation he has. As he continues to read, however, his predictions will change
as he receives more information from the text.
b. Extracting specific information
Very often the reader is involved in the use of receptive skills for the sole purpose of extracting specific information. In other words the reader may look at a
piece of written language not in order to understand it all, but for the purpose of
finding out only one or two facts. This skill when applied to reading is often
called scanning. c. Getting the general picture
Reader often read to something because they want to get the general picture. In other words they want to read something and as a result of their reading have a
general idea of the main points of what they have read: it is the main point that they are interested in, not the detail. Indeed the skill of reading in order to get the
general picture, called skimming, presupposes the reader‘s ability to pick out the main points and discard what is irrelevant, or what is only detail. The reader is
able to skim rapidly over information that is repeated more than once.
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Ibid., p. 531
