Moving Fast, Getting Close: How to Skim with Intention

By Sylvie Thode, English

Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2025

Skimming can get a bad rap, especially in the literature or composition classroom. In reading too fast, the story goes, students risk missing the point of a text or blazing past the wonders of its language. But for many of our students, skimming is an unavoidable component of college education. They may be juggling classes with full-time work, doing their readings on BART commutes, trying to understand a novel in a loud dorm room, or simply struggling to manage a tough schedule of demanding courses. In a perfect world, we could pour over every word of a novel, deciphering its images and language over a mug of tea in a plush armchair. But novels, poems, plays, and scholarly essays are things that exist in the real world and are thus subject to the constraints of reality. Rather than demanding students slow down over every word of a text during their first reading of it—a fantasy that misrecognizes, I believe, the financial reality of many college students today—I have worked to equip my students with the tools they need to succeed in the classroom by acknowledging the pragmatic constraints that they face outside of it. 

Starting a few semesters ago, I have begun to include a module in each of my courses devoted to teaching my students how to skim with intention. This module is part of another initiative I have developed to bolster my students’ intellectual confidence: building “Hidden Syllabus Days” into my syllabi. On these particular days, I formally teach features of university life that faculty often assume students already know, such as how to email a professor, what to do in office hours, how to organize your workweek, how to make a slideshow for an academic presentation, and how to participate in a seminar discussion. Many students come to literature classrooms intimidated by the volume of reading required of them. When I teach skimming, I encourage them to focus on a few select moments within that reading, rather than trying to master all of it at once. “Follow your nose,” I tell them: usually when a passage strikes them as strange or complicated, that’s a sign that there is something important going on, something worth slowing down over. I instruct them to make a note of these passages in the margins of their texts, and then to go back to those passages and review just them before class. Having a deep understanding of several representative passages is more intellectually generative—both to the individual student and to collective class discussion—than racing to finish a text and catching none of it or getting stalled by every detail of the opening pages.

Once my students have finished their first read of the text, I instruct them to go back, make a list of the moments they’ve annotated in the margins, and ask themselves how those moments might relate to each other. Are there common themes or images that bridge across them? What do they find themselves challenged by in those passages? Why did those passages strike them in particular? Oftentimes those connections—the moments to which the student’s attention is drawn, whether consciously or not—are the seeds of a final paper idea. It is then, I tell my students, that it is time to slow down and read their chosen passages very slowly and carefully. Since instituting my skimming instruction, I have found that classroom discussions are more robust and hew closer to textual detail, rather than drifting into vague gestures towards the text’s themes, because each student has several discrete passages ready to hand; I have noticed a similar improvement with regard to specificity in their final papers. 

Teaching students how to skim with intention is not only, therefore, a pedagogical adjustment to the reality of the present-day college classroom; it is also a way of incorporating the skills on which we ultimately assess students in their final assignments into the daily tasks of the course. I know that some of my students are going to skim the readings I assign; why not give them a deliberate and thoughtful method, one that builds upon the broader scaffolding of the course, with which to do so?