Skim Reading Structured Content

By Melvin Ng

Structured content is information that has organizing elements such as tables of contents, headings, bullets, and other organizing clues in the text. Textbooks, business books and technical manuals usually contain structured content.

Skim reading provides a high-level view of such structured information in two ways. First, with this technique, you can get a preview or overview of new material so you can decide how you want to approach it in terms of reading strategies. (It's also useful in finding key ideas in new material.) Second, it's useful for reviewing material you've already studied. The benefit of skimming is that it helps you with the learning process and also aids in locating important information quickly.

Specifically, skim reading structured content involves searching for the main ideas in an article or text by looking for organizational "clues". In other words, an author organizes his or her material in specific ways that can help you discover the main points quickly and easily. The clues can include the following:

• Front and back cover
• Table of contents
• Major and second level headings.
• All headings in bold and italics and diagrams
• The first and last lines of paragraphs
• Summaries
• Other organizers (numbers, days, dates or times, proper names, etc.)

Let's look at each of these "clues" in turn to see how they can help you when you scan read them for information.

Front and back covers

Book covers can provide great summaries of the content. By nature, covers are designed to convey maximum information in the least amount of space. By reading these, you can get a quick understanding of the author's main ideas which, in turn, helps you decide if the book does or doesn't meet your goals on a particular subject.

For example, let's assume that you have an interest in learning how to save money, budget, and reduce credit card debt. You also want an easy guide to these subjects because you're not interested in a lot of theory; you just want the most practical guide possible. So, you go to the library or bookstore and pick up the following book. (Note: this book doesn't really exist; we've created it solely for this chapter to illustrate the techniques.)

The Practical Person's Guide to Saving Money A smart, easy guide to keeping money in your pocket

By scanning the text on the front cover, you can pick out words that fit the purpose of finding a book that fits your needs-"practical", "guide", "saving", "smart", "easy". The text on the front cover is promising so now you look at the back cover of our imaginary book to get a little more detail on the content.

The Practical Person's Guide to Saving Money Ready to get serious about getting control of your finances? We'll show what to do in the following areas: § Create an effective budget. § Save money painlessly. § Get control of your credit card debt. § Plan for the future.

The back cover text shows you that the book will explain how to create an effective budget, help you save money, and get control of credit card debt. So, based on your skimming of the text on the two covers, you can be reasonably sure that the book will give you the answers you need, and it's worth your while to check this book out from the library or buy it from a bookstore.

Table of Contents The Table of Contents gives you the author's organization of his or her subject matter. The table provides a general understanding of what that author feels is important to understand and remember. You can build on that organizational information to "read smart"; that is, concentrate your reading on the areas that will give you the most information in the least amount of time. Below, I've provided you with a partial sample of the Table of Contents for our imaginary book. Table of Content Chapter 1: Getting Control of Your Money..............1 Analyze your spending habits..............................1 Track expenses......................................................3 Sample budgets....................................................6 Chapter 2: Reducing and Eliminating Debt...........10 Debt overload..................................................10 Ridding yourself of credit card addiction...........12 Ordering credit reports from the "Big Three"....14 Finding help with overwheming debt.................16 Debt consolidation and bankruptcy....................19 As you can see above, the Table of Contents gives you very specific clues as to what's included in each of the chapters. For example, Chapter 1 will show you how to analyze your spending habits, track expenses, and provides sample budgets for you to use in your household.

Reference: http://www.articlesbase.com/motivational-articles/skimming-will-it-improve-your-reading-speed-45109.html