2 Previewing a text
Previewing a text means looking over your reading material in order to become familiar with its content before you begin reading it.
Many students begin a reading task by jumping right away to the first word and reading on from there. This is not an efficient way to handle an intensive reading task because you will not get a sense of what the material is about or what the author is trying to communicate to you.
Specifically, we want you to preview:
- To understand the article’s structure and its sections.
- To identify sections that may be more important than others.
- To make predictions about the main ideas and the author’s argument(s)
When looking for articles for a college essay (ESL 117, ESL 118, and beyond), previewing will allow you to assess whether an article, a journal publication, or even a book is relevant to your purpose.
How to Preview a Text:
- Focus on the Title and Author Details: Begin by reading the title and author information.
- Check the Abstract (if available): If there’s an abstract, read it for a summary.
- Focus on Key Elements: Read main headings, subheadings, chapter summaries, and highlighted text, if present.
- Focus on Visual Aids: Examine illustrations, graphs, tables, and diagrams.
- Read the First Sentence in Each Paragraph: Quickly scan the topic sentence of each paragraph.
- Move your eyes quickly over the entire reading. As you glance over the material, note any keywords that might give you additional information about the article’s main idea.
By following these steps, you’ll gain a sense of the text’s content efficiently, before beginning an intensive reading of it.
The content on this PB page has been paraphrased from the websites below. Ideas have been blended to configure this information. For specific details, and to learn more about these topics, visit these websites:
https://www.student.unsw.edu.au/reading-strategies
https://www.lbcc.edu/sites/main/files/file-attachments/previewingrdgpassage.pdf
