Reading Skills

Reading skills you might find useful are: skimming, scanning, predicting, understanding the organisation of a text, guessing meanings and identifying a writer's attitude and purpose.

Skimming is looking through a text very quickly to understand the main topics and arguments. Read the introduction, headings, first and last sentence of each paragraph, and the conclusion. This will help you read and find information faster.

Scanning is looking for details to answer questions that you have. Use the results of your skimming (see above) to find relevant sections, then look quickly through those sections looking for key words that are relevant to your question. This will help you read and find information and quotes faster.

Predicting is guessing the content of a text based on your knowledge of the subject, the author's area of expertise and opinions, and the context. You can do this by asking yourself 'journalistic questions' about the topic before reading.

You need to understand the organisation of a text at 2 levels, at the paragraph level and and at the whole text level. The paragraph level means understanding the organisation of the sentences in a paragraph, and the links between them. For example you can draw arrows from words like 'he', 'she', 'they', and 'it', back to the nouns they refer to.

You also need to understand the logic of the paragraph or group of paragraphs, for example by drawing a mind-map of the the organisation, with words like 'and', 'but' and 'so' linking the topics and sub-topics.

The whole text level is organised in different ways according to the type of document you are reading, for example a memo might have a situation, problem, suggested solution and a request for action. A report usually has a title page, abstract, table of contents, methodology, findings, conclusions and recommendations sections.

Guessing meanings of words and phrases is possible because you know the situation. You can also use the dictionary to find the meaning.

Identifying a writers attitude is done by knowing the connotation (a nice or a bad meaning) of the words he uses. If you see a word that you think may have a special connotation, check in a dictionary and look for the abbreviation 'derog.', which means that the word has a bad meaning. It is also important to know if a writer is 'objective' (gives good and bad points) or 'biased' ( gives only good, or only bad points).

The writer's purposes may include to inform, to teach, to entertain, to persuade, or to criticise, etc.