Phrasal verbs

SKIMMING THROUGH AND WRITING UP 

STUDYING PHRASAL VERBS

By Kate Woodford

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A blog from

Cambridge Dictionary

Oct. 9, 2024

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Today’s post looks at phrasal verbs and prepositional verbs relating to studying, learning, and taking exams.
Let’s start with some useful verbs for reading.
If you read through or read over something, you read it carefully from start to finish, often to find errors or check your understanding:

• When I’ve finished the essay, I’ll read it through.
• I need to read over the last couple of pages.

Go over has two meanings that are relevant to this post. You can go over an essay or other piece of work by examining it carefully, often to look out for errors. You can also go over an essay or some notes by studying them again, often before a test:

• Always go over your essay and check for grammatical errors.
• The morning before the exam, I went over all of my notes.

Meanwhile, if you skim through or skim over a long piece of text, you read it all quickly and not carefully, often just to understand the main points or to find a particular piece of information:

• I’ve just skimmed through the first chapter – I’ll read it properly later.
• I only skimmed over the article and read the relevant bits.

Finally, for ‘reading’ verbs, to pore over a book or document is to read it carefully and with great concentration:

• She’s spent every evening this week poring over her textbooks.

Moving on to the process of learning itself, if you brush up on a skill or knowledge that you had in the past, you make an effort to remember or improve it:

• I need to brush up on my Portuguese before going to Brazil.

Meanwhile, if you pick up a new skill or language, you learn it by observing or listening to other people rather than formally studying:

• You’ll soon pick up the language once you’re living there.
• I picked up lots of cooking tips from my grandma.

Let’s look now at two exam phrasal verbs. If a subject that you have studied comes up in an exam, you are asked a question or questions about it:

• I spent ages studying the structure of the heart, and it didn’t even come up!

If you scrape through an exam, you manage to pass it, but only by a few points:

• He scraped through his final exams despite doing very little course work.

I’ll finish with a useful ‘write’ phrasal verb. If you write up a report or essay, etc., you write the full and final form of it, using notes that you have made:

• I’ve done a basic plan for the essay, now I just need to write it up.

I hope you found this post useful.

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Adapted from: https://dictionaryblog.cambridge.org/2024/10/09/skimming-through-and-writing-up-studying-phrasal-verbs/. Accessed on October 9, 2024. © Cambridge University Press & Assessment 2024. All rights reserved.