Thursday, June 17, 2010

Do you read? Of Which kind?

I found out somewhere that when we read we are following one of these four methods:

Complete reading:
It is the way of reading like you are talking with the writer. You read and enjoy just like after a fruitful telephone chat. Reading novels sometimes brings such feeling. It gives relaxation and increases our imaginary power. 

Reflective reading:
In this kind of reading you are reading each word of the article and reflecting on each word or numbers, analysing them constructively or critically in mind or making notes on the margins. You try to review or summarise what you have read in this kind of reading. Almost like reading economics, physics or geography during high school days. It requires high concentration and demands patience.

Skimming:
In this type you don't stop at each word you pass through the lines quickly, many times reading only parts of it. This type of reading you do with a motivation in mind, you search for some particular information and you are not interested in the whole text. Most of us read news papers like this, skimming the whole news paper but stopping only on the topics which invoke our interest to read them. It makes us quicker and helps us forming a summary or gist of the matter we have read. This kind of reading helps us to form a good overview of the subject read.

Scanning:
Even faster than skimming, like searching a word in a dictionary or searching a telephone number in the directory. It is very focussed kind of reading capability, this style is required to find out a particular piece of information; may be required as a part of reflective reading.

Increasing tendency of internet browsing increases our capacity of skimming and scanning, but on the other hand also increases our impatience to stay at one page. We browse through the links and keep changing from one page to another. We get an overall information of the subject but we lack proper in-depth understanding, and we tend to forget those skimmed and scanned information very soon as we have not reflected on them. 

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