One you have scanned a resource and decided that it is suitable for your purpose; you may then want skim read for further information. This is used for getting the ‘gist’ of a text without painstakingly reading word for word with an internal monologue. The act of reading changes so that you read 3 – 4 words at a time. A useful way to think about this is to consider individual letters in a word – you don’t read each letter but see the whole word. The same applies to skim reading – you don’t read each word but see clusters of information.