Lesson 5: Scanning

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Scanning, yet another speed-reading strategy, is looking for specific words in a body of text, much like looking for a word in a dictionary or a number in a phone book. When speed-readers scan, they aren’t interested in analyzing philosophical prose or anything complicated like that. They’re only interested in finding a specific cue word, topic, and/or meaning instead. You’re going to have to the same interest to be a speed-reader and make cue words your new best friend.

Cue words appear in headings, subheadings, visual aids (such as maps, tables, charts, and illustrations) and the first and last sentences of paragraphs. They also appear in bold, underlined, or italicized font. Once they find the word that they’re looking for, only then do they slow down their reading rate in order to process what they’ve found.

Like skimming, scanning debunks the idea that you have to read everything to be an effective reader and it turns a long drawn-out reading assignment into a few, quick important glances.

Exercise 5

Sharpen your scanning skills with the following exercise. This time you’re going to hunt down three of your favorite books in your home or office. Make sure these are books that you’ve already read. If you don’t have three favorite books, look for two.

Next, think about why these books are your favorites and try to sum up the reason (per book) in one word. Then write down the titles of these books and place your reasons next to their corresponding titles.

Retrieve your books one at a time and scan their tables of contents for the reason(s) you wrote down. Because your reason may appear in the table of contents as a synonym, keep an open mind about alternative expressions. Successful scans will reveal the cue words that suggest your reasons for liking the books. Then again, they might not…

Although the idea here is to train you to scan for specific words or ideas, things get interesting when you run into concepts that make you question your selections. Did you run into words that suggest an alternative reason for liking a book? Did you run into concepts that suggest more than one reason? Whatever the result, scanning is a great way to quickly zero in on what’s important and how valuable that importance is to you.

To further strengthen your scanning skills, practice with different types of documents. Start with essays since they tend to follow predictable patterns. Essays typically organize points in order of importance, so scan their first few paragraphs for information you want to know. Then try the news. Scan news reports for the 5 W’s and an H (the when, where, what, why, who, and how) in the first paragraph.

With enough practice, you’ll soon to be scan any type of reading material for the information you want.

Tip: Another site that discusses these concepts is Speed Reading Techniques