Skimming

Skimming is the process of rapidly moving your eyes over text to get a general overview of the content. You focus on headings, subheadings, the first and last sentences of paragraphs, and any bold or italicized text. This technique is useful when you want to understand the main ideas without reading every word.

Example 1: Imagine you have a lengthy academic article to read for a class. By skimming, you can quickly identify the key points and decide if the article is relevant to your research.

Example 2: When you receive a long email, you might skim it to get the gist of the message and determine if it requires immediate attention.

Scanning

Scanning involves looking for specific information within a text. Instead of reading everything, you search for particular words, phrases, or data points. This technique is useful when you need to find specific details quickly.

Example 1: If you’re looking for a specific statistic in a report, you would scan the text for numbers or terms related to your topic.

Example 2: When searching for a friend’s phone number in a contact list, you scan the list for their name rather than reading every entry