Scanning means knowing what information you need to find before you read. You have something in your mind, your eyes, then, move quickly to find that particular information. You scan when you are looking for a fact or a detail or a particular vocabulary word. When you are scanning, you don’t have to read every word to answer the questions and don’t have understand every word Skimming means reading quickly for general meaning. You skim reading material to find out about topic, the main idea, and generic structure of passage.
For this kind of reading, you only want to find out something and don’t want to know and memorize everything you read. In fact, you should leave out everything except a few important words. There are the words that tell you the general idea. Similarity between skimming & scanning. Scanning and skimming is known as the way of or strategy of faster reading. The skill of skimming and scanning are very important when you need to read quickly for information. Differences between skimming & scanning. * Skimming implies looking for a general overview aimed at identifying the main ideas of a text. In scanning, you move your eyes quickly down the page seeking a specific word, phrase, number or idea. Examples : Skimming If you are skimming a book, you should read the blurb, the preface and table of contents. The Chapter headings provide a reliable indication of the content of the book. You can turn the pages randomly and check its readability, style and seriousness in terms of treatment. You can focus your attention on subheadings, bold, italicized or underlined text, diagrams, graphs, charts and photographs, if any. If there are chapter summaries, you get the vital points quite easily.
You can go to the text to find the details of points in the summary you found interesting. Once you find that the book is worth detailed study, you can go for it. If it is a work of fiction, you can easily form your assessment; you are not looking for the accuracy of facts. Scanning An illustration can help us to appreciate easily what scanning implies. Suppose you go to a festival crowd with a friend, but miss him in the surging throng. Your eyes travel quickly over the crowd to locate your friend’s face, totally ignoring all other faces. Scanning is a similar process in the world of rapid reading.
