1. Business English: Session 6 and 7
Sentence Structure
Review: Skimming and Scanning
Analyzing suffixes and prefixes
Identifying referents
Case Study: Anita Roddick

2. What is skimming?
Skimming is high-speed reading that can save you time and help you get through lots of material quickly.
You skim to get the general sense of a passage or article, not a specific details.
“Will this passage be useful to me?”
“What is the writer’s purpose or general idea?”

3. When do you need to skim? Examples::
You went to a movie and you thought that it was terrible. You notice a review of that movie in today’s newspaper. You want to find out quickly if the reviewer agrees with you.
You are reading a detective story and you are in a hurry to know who did the crime.

4. How do you skim? Don’t need to read the whole text.
Move your eyes very quickly over the pages.
Read only the parts of the text that will help you answer your question(s).

5. How do you skim?
Normally writers introduce their topic and main ideas about that topic right at the beginning.
Therefore, read the first sentences or paragraph carefully.
If the text is too long, you might also read the second paragraph.
You also should read the last paragraph more carefully because the author may summarize the important points at the end.

6. What is scanning?
Scanning is very high-speed reading that you do when you are looking for a specific piece of information.
You do not read every word.
You read only key words that will answer your question.

7. Indentifying referents
Most of the time you find words or phrases which are used to replace a noun or a noun group that has already been mentioned in the previous sentence or paragraph.
These make statements less repetitive and show how the subjects, or objects or a series of clauses are connected.

8. Indentifying referents
These words or phrases signals the reader to seek meaning or locate the referents for them which is previously mentioned in the text.
A wrong identification would lead to confusion and misinterpretation of the passage.

9. Pronoun Personal Pronouns Reflexive Pronouns Relative Pronouns
Subject Pronouns
Object Pronouns
Possessive Pronouns
Reflexive Pronouns
Relative Pronouns
Demonstratives
Indefinite Pronouns
Others

10. Synonym
Also there are several other ways of referring back to something that has been already been mentioned.
They may use several different words to name the same thing.
Example:
An orange can be a delicious snack. This citrus fruit is also very healthful because it is a good source of vitamin C.