Saccades, skimming and scanning

While the basic reading technique includes saccades, not everybody is sufficiently comfortable with saccading eye motion. There is a large amount of literature of scanning and skimming for specific purposes as complementary to reading. Specifically you can use both skimming and scanning for prereading, but also you can use the characteristic eye motion of skimming and scanning for saccade reading.

Saccades are very fast eye jumps when we focus on interesting words in various parts of the page instinctively during prereading and column-by-column during actual reading. The column-by-column method explained by Jonathan is called “skimming”. During skimming the eyes jump very fast between several positions or columns on a line, while the eyes do not move within each column. There is a physiological phenomenon that called “saccadic masking” that actually blind us between columns, and we use this “blind time” to generate markers and details.

A faster alternative to skimming is “scanning”. The scanning methodology really shines when our visual angle is large enough to encompass the entire row width (easy to achieve with newspapers, kindle and mobile devices). Then instead of jumping eye motion, one can scan an entire paragraph top-to-bottom in one continuous motion or saccade. During scanning the saccade masking happens at the end of each paragraph, and so markers are also generated at the end of each paragraph.

If the line is slightly wider (up to 2-columns width), it is easy to read the text in zig-zag motion, still reading a whole paragraph in one saccade. When scanning article in zig-zag motion, try to keep wave-like eye motion and not full-stops, do not focus on the extreme points of the line (if your visual angle is 7 words move focus between 4th word from beginning and 4th word from the end). Many people have photographic memory with a time span of several seconds, which allows scanning longer text lines or several text lines in one glance.

The easiest way to learn the specific eye motion of skimming and scanning is by following scanning and skimming learning tactics. Try using skimming by reading various blog articles: focus on the title, the abstract, the key concepts that appear in each paragraph, the conclusion, graphs/tables/infographic if available. After skimming if you like the article, do read it as you would regularly read it. After finishing reading the article, think about it and try to find a question that is answered within the article. Now scan the article for the answer. When you are comfortable doing this with one article do full search training:
1. Scan 50 articles and choose 20 that are relevant to your search
2. Skim 20 articles and learn the basic ideas of the subject you are interested in
3. Select 5 articles for reading, read all of them
4. Scan all of the relevant article for answers to follow-up questions.

Once you can use eye motion characteristic to skimming and scanning as a basis for saccade training in speedreading, you should try to choose which visual flow enables the best tradeoff of speed and retention. If you get vertigo with skimming or scanning, you will probably try to minimizing it.It makes sense to know both scanning and skimming techniques and rely more the techniques you feel natural with. We have some anecdotal evidence that shows that ADHD/hyperactive students prefer skimming, while OCD/overfocused student often preferred smoother scanning experience. Scanning requires better working memory and takes longer to learn, while skimmers benefit from multitasking training (fast context switch). I am not sure one can comfortably read above 800wpm without skimming and above 1600wpm without scanning. In any case you would need either skimming or scanning for prereading and for web search.

Next time when you need to read something ask yourself: do you want to scan the text, skim the text, or read and retain the details. Choose your reading tactics accordingly to save time…