AI Tutor
You wouldn't ride a skateboard down a rocky mountain trail at full speed, but you also wouldn't crawl on your hands and knees across an open basketball court. Different surfaces need different speeds.
Reading works the exact same way — different types of writing require totally different reading speeds and goals.
How do you know which speed to pick before you even read the first sentence?

Matching Speed to Genre

A text's genre is simply its category or style, such as fantasy fiction, poetry, a science article, or a recipe. When you spot the genre, you can set a clear reading purpose — what you want to get out of the text.
If you know your goal, how do you shift your brain into the right reading gear?

The Three Reading Gears

Expert readers switch between three main gears: skimming and scanning to spot specific keywords quickly, steady reading to follow a story's action, and close reading to analyze challenging facts and diagrams.
Let's see what happens when we apply these gears to two totally different genres.

Worked Example: Shifting Your Gear

Suppose you open two texts: Text A is an adventure story about an astronaut, and Text B is a science article explaining how rocket engines burn liquid fuel.