Skimming–Reading for main idea
Many learners find it is helpful to employ a skimming strategy when they need to quickly ascertain the gist of a text. Skimming is a top-down strategy (for more on this see Lingua.ly’s blog post on top-down and bottom-up processing) that helps you activate prior knowledge on a given topic to provide a basis for making inferences and integrating new information gleaned from the text.
When you allow your eyes to quickly run over sentences in order to understand the main idea through keywords, you are using a skimming strategy. With skimming, it’s all about spending time on the introduction and topic sentence so you have a general idea of what you are reading about before you skim through the rest and process topical words that re-inforce your understanding of the main idea. You certainly don’t pick up on everything with this technique, and chances are you will miss out on the nuances and details of the text, but that’s what scanning’s for!