The pleasures of skimming and scanning

Isaac Asimov: “I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.” (Image via Wikimedia Commons)

It’s a truism that the Internet has changed what and how much we read. As a result, we skim and scan a lot more than we used to.

The two practices aren’t the same. To spell out the basics, when you skim, you go through an entire passage very quickly to grasp the essentials. And when you scan, you rapidly make your way through a text to locate specific pieces of information. Both are different from skipping, which is when you give entire sections a miss – a practice I also tend to indulge in before abandoning a book altogether.

Students and academics, of course, need to rely on skimming and scanning. Those for whom reading is a professional task know that poring over every single word means running the risk of becoming like poor Casaubon from George Eliot’s Middlemarch. As Dorothea Brooke discovers, the result of her husband’s obsession with unravelling “the key to all mythologies” is to drain him of vitality. To make things worse, he’s ineffectual in his pursuits. No one wants that to happen.

Even for the general reader, there’s so much material available online that reading every sentence is a self-defeating exercise, if not impossible. Add to that the scroll bar’s insidious ease of use. It seems to have been designed especially to make you to buck up and get on with it.

When it comes to books, though, there’s a faintly disreputable air that hangs over skimming and scanning. It’s almost as though in such cases, the right way of reading is to pore over every page carefully. If you don’t do this, you’re guilty of a nefarious practice that needs to be kept private and only admitted to under duress.

This seems unfair. Let’s be frank and admit that - with notable exceptions that we’ll come to - most books are too long. Had we but world enough and time, such bulkiness would be no crime. Since that’s not the case, it’s dismaying to find that so many works of non-fiction are simply essays that are stretched to breaking point, and so many writers of fiction are intent on creating an unnecessary stream of events for their characters to respond to.
There could be good reasons to toss such books aside, but length doesn’t have to be one of them. That’s when skimming and scanning comes in, to separate the wheat from the chaff. At times, you could even find that there’s more grain than husk, leading you to the worthwhile activity of slowing down and perhaps starting over.

Some publishers have turned skimming and scanning into a business model. Consider Reader's Digest Condensed Books, for example. In 1987, the New York Times reported that over 1.5 million people bought close to 10 million copies of these condensed editions every year, making it one of the most successful publishing ventures in America at the time. What remains debatable, though, is whether you want to rely on someone else’s judgement to decide what’s important.

Several courses and apps that promise to make you read faster often suggest such practices to make you reach the end of a book before you can say “loose, baggy monster”. Their breathless guarantees should be tempered with the words of Isaac Asimov: “I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.”

It shouldn’t need to be pointed out that skimming and scanning aren’t recommended as default ways of reading a book. If you start with that in mind, you miss out on so much that makes reading a worthwhile endeavour. Few experiences can match the state of slipping into the “vivid and continuous dream” of a book, to use John Gardner’s famous phrase.

Take a novel in the news nowadays, Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand, in Hindi and in the English translation by Daisy Rockwell. Despite its heft, as writer Anukrti Upadhyay recently pointed out, its language hovers “between prose and poetry, its plot between real, surreal and absurd, its characters [leap] in and out of symbols of class and culture”. You lose so many of those delights if you decide to skim it.

With Tomb of Sand, it’s the uniqueness of prose and vaulting ambition; with others, it could be a taut plot, an immersive sense of place, or more. Such works demand sustained attention: it’s engagement that will produce rewards. For the rest, as Sturgeon’s Law puts it, 90 percent of everything is below par. Feel free to skim and scan away.