Notes

Skimming is a reading technique meant to look for main or general ideas in a text, without going into detailed and exhaustive reading. In skimming, a reader reads only important information, but not everything. This technique works effectively in non-fiction materials, newspapers, and long novels.

To get a gist of the text, a skimmer reads the introductory paragraph, the topic sentences of paragraphs, and notices pictures, graphs, charts, titles, headings, subheadings, italicized and boldface words, and their illustrations, and makes a mental picture of the text after viewing this information. He then transforms this picture into a summary.

Skimming can save you hours of laborious reading. However, it is not always the most appropriate way to read. It is very useful as a preview to a more detailed reading or when reviewing a selection heavy in content. But when you skim, you may miss important points or overlook the finer shadings of meaning, for which rapid reading or perhaps even study reading may be necessary.

Use skimming to overview your textbook chapters or to review for a test. Use skimming to decide if you need to read something at all, for example during the preliminary research for a paper. Skimming can tell you enough about the general idea and tone of the material, as well as its gross similarity or difference from other sources, to know if you need to read it at all.

Example in daily life :

1. If you are going to face an exam, read the summary to remember about the lesson passed.
2. If you want to read comic but don't have any time for finish it, just read the important picture and skip the page that you feel don't important.
3. Read the bold, italic, and underline text in a book or a long-novel when you read it and want to find the gist fastly,

Source :
www.usingenglish,com
http://www.butte.edu/