Skimming is used to quickly gather the most important information, or “gist.” Run your eyes over the text, noting important information. Use skimming to quickly get up to speed on a current business situation. It’s not essential to understand each word when skimming.
Skimming is covering the chapter to get some of the main ideas and a general overview of the material. It is what you do first when reading a chapter assignment. You don’t read for details at this point.
Here is how you skim a chapter:
- Read the first paragraph of the chapter line by line.
- Next, read all the bold print headings starting at the beginning.
- Read the first sentence of every paragraph.
- Study any pictures, graphs, charts, and maps.
- Finally, read the last paragraph of the chapter.
As you skim, you could write down the main ideas and develop a chapter outline.
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