I find that writing spaced-repetition prompts in the way the article describes to have too small of a return on investment: Reviewing them is quick, but it takes a lot of effort to craft good ones from a text.
Good authors take care with their prose and use nuance to get their point across, which is often lost in the translation to a few bullet points. This subtlety is often the meat of the text, and the high-level points are the bones that hold it all together: essential, but not where the real value is.
My Anki deck is mostly cloze deletions automatically extracted from ebooks, where I've imported the entire text ~20 lines at a time. I've deliberately set up the review schedule so that it's hard for me to memorize particular phrases: 1 week for the first review and 4 weeks for the second, with a 1 day delay for misses. This forces me to remember what role the passage plays in the wider narrative (argument for non-fiction) to successfully predict the blanked-out word.
With this setup, I'm noticing new connections between different sections of the same book, and between different books, every time a card comes up for review: My understanding of the world has changed since I last saw it, and so I notice different subtleties than I did the first time around.
Instead of viewing them as a chore, I'm now actually excited to do my Anki reviews every morning-- where they used to make me mentally exhausted, they're now a warm-up that gets my brain started for the day.
Though this engagement itself aids memorization...
I'm not a fan of spaced repetition, instead preferring to understand material and find connections (associations) integrating it within my existing knowledge. This makes it usable, not just recallable. It's holographic, in that I can also recover it from other things I know, like the shape of the missing jigsaw piece, or a theorem or proof.
However, I've come to realize that the very act of engagement to understand is, in itself, aiding memorization.
This is very interesting! Can you say more about the task you perform when you see these prompts? How do you decide how to "grade" your response? Presumably it's not just whether or not you can remember the deleted word(s)?
Also: are you blanking out individual words? Phrases? Sentences? An example would be interesting if you're willing to share!
Really interesting how you extract cloze deletions from ebooks! It sounds very similar to what I'm building with Traverse.link, a social spaced repetition app with connected cards.
You can import an article (working on ebook support), and it'll turn the paragraphs into cards, to which you can then add cloze deletions and free form prompts.
I enjoyed this article however the examples given were markedly poor. The article talks a lot about distilling knowledge and what it is to “know” a topic, then the example flash cards about the article ask things like “vague prompts result in ______ recollection”, which is trivia about word selection. Although I suppose this just indicates how difficult prompt writing can be, perhaps a section on “what it means to answer a prompt” was necessary. Consider as an alternative: “what is the problem with vague prompts?”
From the article:
"Unfortunately, most spaced repetition interfaces treat each prompt as a sovereign unit, which makes this kind of high-level revision difficult."
This is why I've built Traverse (https://traverse.link/), a spaced repetition app with hierarchical and interlinked markdown flashcards, so you study connected knowledge rather than bare facts
If you are using spaced repetition, or thinking about using spaced repetition with these kind of hand-crafted notes, you might be interested in Mochi[0], which uses markdown note-cards and kind of mixes the Zettelkasten concept and spaced repetition into one app.
What is the advantage of a proprietary SaaS SRS webapp as opposed to open source Anki? (note that Anki has support for, for example, LaTex, which makes collections in topics such as math highly useful).
I read a couple pages of the friendly article, waiting and waiting for the missing vocab word to be filled in.
I reluctantly opened the link that was an introduction to spaced repetition.
I opened the Wikipedia article for spaced repetition.
I searched on DuckDuckGo for "Anki prompt" and "Anki what is a prompt"
I opened the Wikipedia article for Anki.
What the hell is a prompt? Is it the question on the flashcard? Does Anki show you pop-ups periodically? There's no onboarding ramp for someone who doesn't know what spaced repetition is to read this article about 'prompts'
Prompts is a piece of jargon, unfortunately confusing but crucial to anyone trying to memorize anything using an SRS. A prompt could take the form “What is a X” or be a blank “the dog ____ over the log” or just be a foreign word like 中国. So in some ways its a more general concept than a “question” but calling it the front side of a flashcard is probably clearer.
The article has example prompts on its own content, served with the author's platform Orbit, I found these to be a useful (though meta) illustration of what he means by prompts.
The word “prompt” has nothing to do with SRS, I learned it in grade school English class. The “prompt” is the thing given by the lesson to prompt you to write onwards. Although to be fair I didn’t actually find this definition in the two dictionaries I checked, which was very surprising to me.
Creating and generating good questions and answers is a skill. Too vague, you don't know if your answer is incorrect or not. If your answer require too much, you're never going to get the answer right, and so forth.
I went to read the article expecting it to be about making command line prompts that would help users remember them by acting as spaced repetition lessons.
Exactly my thoughts. The article is all pseudoscientific hogwash.
I skimmed through to understand what it's about or at least to know what a "prompt"/"spaced repetition" is. I still don't know, but I bet it's something very trivial.
[+] [-] kd5bjo|5 years ago|reply
Good authors take care with their prose and use nuance to get their point across, which is often lost in the translation to a few bullet points. This subtlety is often the meat of the text, and the high-level points are the bones that hold it all together: essential, but not where the real value is.
My Anki deck is mostly cloze deletions automatically extracted from ebooks, where I've imported the entire text ~20 lines at a time. I've deliberately set up the review schedule so that it's hard for me to memorize particular phrases: 1 week for the first review and 4 weeks for the second, with a 1 day delay for misses. This forces me to remember what role the passage plays in the wider narrative (argument for non-fiction) to successfully predict the blanked-out word.
With this setup, I'm noticing new connections between different sections of the same book, and between different books, every time a card comes up for review: My understanding of the world has changed since I last saw it, and so I notice different subtleties than I did the first time around.
Instead of viewing them as a chore, I'm now actually excited to do my Anki reviews every morning-- where they used to make me mentally exhausted, they're now a warm-up that gets my brain started for the day.
[+] [-] hyperpallium2|5 years ago|reply
Though this engagement itself aids memorization...
I'm not a fan of spaced repetition, instead preferring to understand material and find connections (associations) integrating it within my existing knowledge. This makes it usable, not just recallable. It's holographic, in that I can also recover it from other things I know, like the shape of the missing jigsaw piece, or a theorem or proof.
However, I've come to realize that the very act of engagement to understand is, in itself, aiding memorization.
[+] [-] andymatuschak|5 years ago|reply
This is very interesting! Can you say more about the task you perform when you see these prompts? How do you decide how to "grade" your response? Presumably it's not just whether or not you can remember the deleted word(s)?
Also: are you blanking out individual words? Phrases? Sentences? An example would be interesting if you're willing to share!
[+] [-] edylemond|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CGamesPlay|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edylemond|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] knubie|5 years ago|reply
[0] https://mochi.cards/
[+] [-] BossingAround|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] guilhermekbsa|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edylemond|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ReactiveJelly|5 years ago|reply
I read a couple pages of the friendly article, waiting and waiting for the missing vocab word to be filled in.
I reluctantly opened the link that was an introduction to spaced repetition.
I opened the Wikipedia article for spaced repetition.
I searched on DuckDuckGo for "Anki prompt" and "Anki what is a prompt"
I opened the Wikipedia article for Anki.
What the hell is a prompt? Is it the question on the flashcard? Does Anki show you pop-ups periodically? There's no onboarding ramp for someone who doesn't know what spaced repetition is to read this article about 'prompts'
[+] [-] porknubbins|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jon_tau|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akdor1154|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CGamesPlay|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kiba|5 years ago|reply
Creating and generating good questions and answers is a skill. Too vague, you don't know if your answer is incorrect or not. If your answer require too much, you're never going to get the answer right, and so forth.
[+] [-] CompArtisan|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cortesoft|5 years ago|reply
I was very wrong.
[+] [-] vienarr|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lausobo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] alex_young|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bertylicious|5 years ago|reply
I skimmed through to understand what it's about or at least to know what a "prompt"/"spaced repetition" is. I still don't know, but I bet it's something very trivial.