Active reading is a skill that all successful students must master. Unlike reading for pleasure, active reading always has a clear purpose—to grasp meaning, to understand discussion and to interpret evidence. It is, essentially, reading and thinking performed at the same time in order to extract key information from a text and process it for re-presentation in your own words. There are three key techniques for active reading which we'll look at in turn: scanning, skimming and focused reading. Scanning is useful to gain an overview of a text and the topics that are dealt with. It involves glancing over the structure of a text—looking at the table of contents, chapter heading and subheadings—for clues about its focus. Although this approach does not generate much detailed learning, it can help you to understand whether a piece of writing is applicable to your study and whether it merits further attention. If it does, you may try the second technique. skimming. Skimming involves letting your eyes pass over the text in search of appropriate key words. For example, if you are interested in extracting evidence, you might skim a paragraph for words like 'research' or 'data', or for statistical analysis. Once you locate the sections that seem most relevant, then you will want to employ the third technique, focused reading.