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Skim-reading

Incanus

Auror
Basically, I never skim anything when I read. I think the closest I come to that is when I occasionally speed up a bit.

So I have a question for people who do skim read. If you skim over something–say a description–how do you KNOW for sure if that is what you skimmed or skipped, not having actually read it? If the passage had something else in it, how would you know that?

I ask because I honestly don’t understand (and I hope I don’t sound troll-ish). I don’t fast-forward through portions of a movie. I don’t fast-forward through a portion of a song. I don’t cover up a section of a painting I’m looking at. And for the exact same reason, I don’t skim over any of the text of a story.

There must be more to this whole skimming thing that I’m not getting.
 
Usually when I skim I get the most basic information, the surface level stuff. Because I have read a lot of things I can usually pick up if that passage was critical to my understanding of a chapter, novel, work, or any other subdivision. In those cases I go and re read what I had skimmed. I also don't do it a lot. Usually on books or passages that are not particularly engaging. I did a ton of it during Inheritance and Brisngr. But have not done it for anything by Clancy, Sanderson, Abercrombie, or other authors that I enjoy. Name of the Wind got this treatment a couple of times when Kuoth or whatever his name is waxed more poetic than the drunken love child of Lord Byron and Emily Dickinson.
 

Penpilot

Staff
Article Team
I don't know if it's the same as what you're describing, but I chunk read. What I mean by that is I read 2-4 words at a time instead of one. I still read every word. (Though I don't always do this.)

I adjust the text size on my reading devices to help me do this more effectively. Some writing styles lend themselves to being read this way. For me the denser the prose, the less effective I am at doing this, but I have a friend who does something similar but they skip words. But the words they skip are, the, that, to, etc. so they only read the most important words.
 

La Volpe

Sage
I never skim fiction either. However, I do skim non-fiction articles and whatnot.

When I want to quickly get the gist of an article, I skim by reading the first (and maybe last) sentence of a paragraph. The general rule for writing paragraphs is that you split when you go to a new topic (not always, but mostly). Another rule (though this applies more to non-fiction maybe) is that writers will mostly want their first sentence to be the topic sentence. Ergo, as a reader, you might encounter a sentence that begins to describe a landscape at the beginning of a ten line paragraph. You can guess that the rest of the paragraph will also deal with the description (looking at the last line can confirm this), and thus assume that the paragraph was a description of the landscape.

Don't know if this method applies to people who skim fiction, but that's how I quickly get a good idea of what an article is about. In a way, each paragraph's first sentence is like the first part of a novel. It either draws me to read the rest of the paragraph, or I just skip over it to the next.
 
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caters

Sage
I don't skim any fiction or nonfiction. However I am a fast reader just like my grandma. My momma on the other hand is a slow reader.

I am a fast learner so maybe that is 1 factor that contributes to my fast reading without skimming, especially with nonfiction.
 

skip.knox

toujours gai, archie
Moderator
I confess I do skim, for two reasons. One, it's an unfortunate habit acquired from years of historical research. When I'm in research mode, I'm looking for specific information from a book. I'm not there to read the book itself. This is an exploitative, selfish way to read, but it's the only way you can get through a couple hundred books on the way to writing your own (history book, that is). I developed this during many long of graduate school. After the dissertation was done I breathed a big sigh of relief and thought "great! I can finally get back to reading novels!" Only to discover that I was not enjoying them, and it was because I was skimming--like whole pages at a time. I could tell you what the book was about, but I did not actually enjoy it. I had to work very hard to slow myself down and read every sentence.

The second factor, and this makes slowing down so much harder, is bad writing. When an author goes on too long in a scene description, or is sloppy or tedious with the dialog, or is just too facile and lazy, my attention starts to wander. Think of when you are watching a movie and there's the action scenes and you're glued to the screen, but there are these pieces of slow exposition and so maybe you're still watching but that's when you eat the nachos. Right? That's sort of what happens with me in reading. And then it's like stepping onto ice on a hill. I start skimming and then I keep skimming and then you really need to do something (EXPLOSION!) to get me to slow down again.

I'm not happy with any of this. The only way I've really been able to slow is to read great literature--to get completely away from fantasy and read some very chewy prose. I also make myself read in smaller chunks, because physical tiredness can also enter into it. Anything to keep my eyes from starting to slide across the page.

You asked how I know what I've missed. That's easy. I don't. If I missed it, I missed it. That's why I try to slow down.
 

Incanus

Auror
Thanks for the responses. I think I've learned something here, and that's always good.

I don't think it ever occurred to me to skim-read books that aren't exactly strong in the prose department, for that very reason. I wonder if that is a habit I could even learn at my age?

Because I read slowly and carefully 95% of the time, my current version of skimming a book with weak-ish writing is to pass on it altogether and get to the next book in the pile.

I don't know--having that feeling of not knowing what it is I just skipped over is just too overpowering. I don't think I can bring myself to do it. I suppose I could experiment with it. But I think I'd be too embarrassed to bring a copy of Twilight up to a register, though. On the other hand, there'll never be a shortage of poor to mediocre books to look at.
 

Peat

Sage
Skip basically described me (save I flunked out on history after my Masters). I finished my skim reading training in the heady world of media monitoring and pretending to read 2000 seperate newspaper articles a night.

I never set out to skim read fiction, but if they're boring the tits off of me but not so much that I don't want to find out how it reads, I'll start to skim. Its pretty much never deliberate - if I'm bored enough to deliberately skim read, I'm bored enough to turn to the last ten per cent of the book and just read the end - then I just slip into it.

I also sometimes do this on the first read through of a book when its 3am and I am finishing that *&%(ing book today.

And as he says, if you miss something you miss something. That said - when you skim a lot, you get good at picking out interesting things. Sometimes I'm on the next page and my mind nudges me to go back and have a closer look.
 
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