Basic Reading Strategies

1) Intensive Reading
2) Scanning

• Used when you look through reference material or directories to quickly find small pieces of information.
• A skill that most people understand, but do not use nearly enough.
• Many individuals could increase their reading speed simply by using index pages of books to find the information they want.

3) Skimming

• When the index/contents page fails, then you will be forced to skim. To skim a book, you read it in the following order:

(3a) The Contents Page
(3b) The Conclusion/Introduction
(3c) For Each Relevant Chapter:

• Summary
• First paragraph
• First and last sentence of other paragraphs

(3d) Intensively Read Key Information

• By doing this, you can gain an overview of a book and from there you can decide if it is going to be useful.

4) Referencing
5) Searching
[Source: X-Treme Speed Reading by James Abela]