Get the Big Picture
Previewing, skimming, or predicting can make your reading more efficient.
Have you ever watched a painter work, standing close to a canvas to apply layers of paint, and then standing back to get the big picture before moving on? You may even remember the old cliché in cartoons of an artist standing back to measure perspective by sighting along his thumb. Creating a "picture," an understanding, of a text in your mind requires the same kinds of changes in perspective. The first thing you will need to do is to get the big picture, by standing back and using a pre-reading strategy:
Preview. To preview the text, look at it from the outside and try and determine the context of the reading:
- Determine what it is you are reading: what do you already know about the who, what, where, when and why.
- Ask yourself what you already know about the topic.
- If there are references, read the citations to see what kind of sources the author cites.
- Remember to ask yourself why you are doing this reading.
Skim. To skim the text, move in a little closer:
- Scan the text to determine its structure: does it have chapters or subsections?
- Read the abstract, the executive summary, and/or the introduction: what do you predict the writer's main idea or thesis will be?
- Read the table of contents (for a book) or any heading and subheadings within the text (for chapters or articles); identify where each piece seems to fit in the overall picture.
- Read the conclusion, or the findings or discussions section, if there is one.
Predict. To use predictions to help you plan the big picture, think about where you are going, what kind of meanings you need to get from this text:
- Write down the questions that occur to you as you preview of skim.
- Make predictions about what the author is trying to get at.
- Ask yourself: how will reading this help me achieve my purpose?
You can use "Activity Three: Creating the Big Picture" to work through these pre-reading processes.
Note
Note also that you may also be done reading now, depending on what your purpose for reading was. If your purpose, for example, was to determine whether or not you wanted to use a particularly scholarly article for in your own research, you may have discovered during this step that it won't work for your project, and decided not to use it-in that case, you might want to file it with your notes (in case you want to use it for some other project) and move on to something else. If, however, you need to read in more depth, move on to the next step...
After you have taken these pre-reading steps, you will have created a "big picture," or a map, of the reading you are about to do, and you will find that a second reading, a line-by-line reading, will be much more efficient, perhaps even taking less time than if you had dived right in.
