Student Pathway

A brief introduction to surveying text is provided on the University of Auckland website.  The authors state:  

       Surveying  is a pre reading activity.  If you survey something, you look at the whole          of it.  Surveying a text means reading to obtain a general idea of its contents, and            predicting what will come next and how the text will develop.  To get a general                idea, you do not read everything. You skim; you read quickly to find out about the            topic, the main ideas, and the general organizaiton of the text. 

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Surveying helps give you focus when you start reading a passage word for word.  This should improve your conprehension of the text.  Textbooks are usually set up to make surveying worthwhile.  That is,  they provide a title, headings and sub-headings.  They may provide study questions at the end of each chapter to give you additional cues as to what is important.   They usually provide an introduction at the beginning of each chapter and a summary of what has been covered at the end.

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Narrative text,  the kind of text you will find when a story is being told (e.g., in a novel),

can be more difficulty to preview.

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Surveying is often discussed in the context of a reading strategy called SQ3R.   Discussion of the SQ3R method can be found here and here.  

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