 Today we are going to talk about skimming and scanning. These two skills are known as active reading strategies that keeps the brain active, engaged and focused. It also helps the reader to understand and retain information for longer period of time. Okay, let's see what skimming is. Scanning is a reading technique that focus on finding the main or general idea without reading the extra detail. The purpose of scanning is to locate main idea and to get the general overview. So we can say that skimming is basically a strategy that use the method of selective reading in which the reader focuses only on the selective material and skip the text which contains elaborative details or extra information. There are few things that you can do when you are skimming. The first thing is that try to read the introduction and conclusion of the written material because as we know that every paragraph contains a topic sentence and a concluding sentence and it helps to understand the general idea of the paragraph. Similar is the case with any written material if it's an essay, the introduction paragraph and the concluding paragraph contains the general overview of that particular essay. And if you are reading a book or a chapter try to read the summary because summary is like the precise detail of that particular written material. And it is also advised if there are bold words in a written piece try to locate them because those words are the content words that can give you the idea or the general overview that what this particular paragraph is about. So when you are skimming what you need to do is try to locate the topic. If you are reading an essay about environmental problems or environmental pollution then the topic or the title will give you an idea that the whole written material or the essay is going to be about environmental pollution. What you need to do is try to recall the information you already have on that particular topic and then try to make an assumption or prediction that maybe it is going to give about the factors that contributes in environmental pollution or maybe it is about the remedies that we can utilize in order to control environmental pollution. So this way we know that skimming is a quick reading strategy in which we have to read things quickly without looking for the extra details. There are few other reading techniques that you can utilize when you are skimming that you can preview the knowledge you already have and you can make an assumption and make a suggestion that what is going to be happening in the paragraph. You can summarize for the main idea or you can make like a comment when you are reading and you can write down the information. Now we are going to see what is the benefit of skimming. Firstly it is a reading technique that saves time and it also helps you to get information quickly and when you are reading in order to get information it helps you to avoid information that is not relevant to your research and it also makes a reader to find new information. Now we will look at the other reading technique which is scanning. In this particular technique what reader needs to do is to locate specific information. So what reader do is that they read and try to locate a specific information. For example a reader is trying to locate a telephone number or a phone address or an address for a particular location. So what as a reader you do that you quickly go through the text and look for the specific information and that is all you do not need to go into the reading all the details and it is not like reading word for word. So there are few steps that you can utilize when you are doing scanning. The first thing is that try to locate the keywords then try to scan through your eyes and it is more like less reading and more searching. There are few techniques that you can use when you are doing scanning. The first thing is try to read the title avoid looking for the facts and details and try to focus on the specific information that you require. It is good to read the first paragraph because in the first paragraph you will get the general idea. For example if you are reading a passage or an essay that is about world war. So if you need to find out that one exactly world war one ended you do not need to read word for word for it rather than what you need to do is try to locate where the numbers are written because you try to find out the year in which it ended. So you do not have to read everything you just are trying to scrolling through the whole lines and searching for the numbers and wherever you find it at that stage your whole process of scanning ends. Now we are going to see what are the benefits of scanning. The first thing is that it helps the reader to avoid going into the detail and it saves time and it can help you to locate specific information by looking at specific data figures and details and most importantly it helps the reader to grasp the idea of the author and it also helps the reader when they are trying to find information to save its time. So in order to conclude what we have gone so far is that both skimming and scanning are reading strategies and it is also known as active reading strategies because both skills helps the reader to try to locate information one is for grasping the general idea to find the main point to find the summary on the other hand the other one is to locate specific information if we try to find out a specific detail related to a person or trying to find out when something exactly happened so we try to overlook all the facts and specific details rather we locate that particular information.