Skim Through a Book
If you don't have much time and you need to determine whether a book is worth purchasing, borrowing, or reading, 'skimming skills' will aid you in the process.
Contents
Steps
- Read the Title - dead giveaway.
- Read the subtitle - some titles are ambiguous, but subtitles tend to shed more light.
- Read the preface - usually the writer(s) explain exactly what the book is about.
- Look at the Table of Contents - this will give you further information on the books subject structure and components.
- Read the Publisher's blurb - usually located in the back, some are found in the book's dust cover. This too is an excellent way to discover the gist of a book.
- Identify important chapters to read and less important chapters.
- Read the first and last lines of each paragraph to get a feel for the flow of argument and the topics of the chapter.
Tips
- Reading topic sentences and concluding sentences only works if the title is professionally written non-fiction.
- Some religious books index Scripture passages. This is called a "Scripture index."
- Finally, you may want to consult books which will help you develop active reading skills, a classic one would be "How to Read A Book" by Adler and Van Doren.
- Take notes, since you are not reading you will need these notes to help you remember.
- Check out the "Index" of a book. This will give you somewhat of a bird's view of subjects and amount of space the writer devotes to each topic. This is called a "subject index."
- Some books even offer an index of authors the writer refers to in the book. This is called an "author index."
Warnings
- Publisher blurbs are often written by a marketing department and so although seldom inaccurate, they may bear little or no resemblance to the material, veracity, accuracy or approach the book takes to the material.
