Ángel Rodrigo Santos León

Skimming y Scaninig
Skimming and scanning: what they consist of

Skimming and scanning are two techniques that seek to accelerate the reading of

texts, mainly academic, to get directly to the point. Its objective, then, is common: not

having to complete reading the document to extract the information that interests us. Thus,

their differences lie in the way they work:

Skimming consists of reading only the first and last paragraphs of each page, that is,

the introduction and conclusion. The idea is to stick only with the most important concepts,

which tend to be concentrated in these parts, and avoid the rest: obviously, skimming will

not allow you to delve into the content, but it will allow you to go directly to the point and

skip the complementary parts. This technique can be very useful to review class notes once

you have studied it, or complementary bibliography to the bulk of the material, or to get an

idea of whether the text in question is of interest. However, we have to make sure that we

are understanding what we read: otherwise it is better that we go back to the text from the

beginning and read it in its entirety, or we will lose information that may be important.

Scanning, for its part, consists of exploring the text, that is, searching for the

information that we need to find in the document without having to read it completely

thanks to a visual exploration: it involves searching with your eyes over the text until that

we find the term, word, concept or idea that we need to reread. For this to work, it is very

important that you are clear about the structure of the text, since this way you will know

which paragraphs you should go to and where what you are looking for should be.