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Reading skills

Throughout your time at university, you will be required to read and engage with many articles, books and other information sources. On this page, you will find tips to help you manage your reading load by reading both efficiently and effectively.

Reading efficiently: surveying, skimming and scanning

Students can be easily overwhelmed by the amount of reading they are required to do at university. This short video gives you an overview of what makes an efficient reader and shows you how to become one yourself.

In some of your courses, you may find that you are faced with long lists of required readings. The truth is, you are not required to read every book, every journal article, or every research paper word-for-word. Instead, you need to learn how to survey, skim, and scan texts. This will allow you to get the most out of texts, whilst saving you a lot of time in the long run.

So, how do I survey a text? Surveying texts is straight-forward; in fact, you're probably already using this reading technique without realising. To survey a text, you read the title, the cover blurb, the contents page, and the index. Then, you quickly look over the chapter headings.

How do I skim? When you're skimming a text, you're looking for just the main ideas.

How do I scan? When scanning, you're looking for the important keywords in a text, you are quickly looking for the detail.

Let's look at the example.

[Topic sentence] The functions of a team leader may often vary. [End topic sentence] [Linking word] Depending [end linking word] on the nature of the [Keyword] team, [End keyword] the [Keyword] leader [End keyword]  may function predominantly in [Keyword] many diverse roles, [End keyword] [Linking word] such as [End linking word] an overseer, a resource person, a setter of benchmarks for best practice by the [Keyword] team, [End keyword] a [Keyword] team [End keyword] builder, or take on all of these [Keyword] roles [End keyword] and others (Addison, 1996). [Linking word] Since [End linking word] the [Keyword] team leader [End keyword] will have [Keyword] varying [End keyword] skills in these [Keyword] roles, [End keyword] it is likely that they may not perform each task equally well. [Linking word] Therefore, [End linking word] it is reasonable to argue that the [Keyword] role [End keyword] of the [Keyword] team [End keyword] leader is not always necessarily an asset.

So, what next? So you've surveyed, skimmed, and scanned everything like you were supposed to. Now what? Often this is enough to get the main idea of a text, but sometimes you will need to read the text in detail. However, since you now know what the key ideas and keywords are, and you have a general idea of where to find this information, you'll find it easier to read only the stuff that's relevant.

So, let's recap:
<ul>
<li>When we survey, we read the title, cover blurb, contents page, index, and chapter headings of a text.</li>
<li>When we skim, we just look for the main ideas of a text.</li>
<li>And, when we scan, we look for the keywords of a text.</li>
</ul>

Surveying

Surveying is a pre-reading technique that allows you to get a general idea of the contents of a book, article or other type of text.

Once you have surveyed, you can often decide whether to then read the text in detail, or if it doesn't have the information you need, move on to the next text.

For books and articles, you start by looking at:

  • blurbs, abstracts and summaries
  • introduction and conclusion paragraphs
  • headings and sub headings
  • any images, graphs or charts and their captions
  • chapter outlines or key points, if they have been provided

With your surveying done, you can then move on to skimming and scanning.