Handouts > Reading Skills > Skimming Guidelines

     Your purpose in skimming is to get an overall impression of the content of a reading selection.  The technique of skimming involves selecting and reading those parts of the selection that contain the most important ideas and merely glancing at the rest of the material.  Below is a step-by-step procedure to follow in skimming for main ideas.

1. Read the title.  If the piece is an article, check the author, publication date, and source.      

2.Read the introduction.  Read the first paragraph completely to get the topic and main idea of the whole text.  Usually the main idea appears at the end of the introduction.

3. Read any headings and subheadings.  The headings, when taken together, form an outline of the main topics that are covered in the material.

4. Notice any pictures, charts, or graphs; these are usually included to emphasize important ideas, concepts, or trends. 

5. If you do not get enough information from the headings or if you are working with material that does not have headings, read the first sentence of each paragraph. Very often the firs sentence will be a statement of the main idea of that paragraph.

6. Glance at the remainder of the paragraph.
a. Notice any italicized or boldface words or phrases.  These are key terms used
  throughout the selection.
b. Look for any lists of ideas within the text of the material.  The author may use
  numerals, such (1),(2),(3), in the list or may included signal words such as first,
  second, one major cause, another cause.  
c. Look for unusual or striking features of the paragraph.  You may notice a series
  of dates, many capitalized words, or several large-figure numbers.

 7. Read the last paragraph which is often a summary of the whole article.

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