How to write good prompts: using spaced repetition to create understanding
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.<p>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.<p>My Anki deck is mostly cloze deletions automatically extracted from ebooks, where I&#x27;ve imported the entire text ~20 lines at a time.  I&#x27;ve deliberately set up the review schedule so that it&#x27;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.<p>With this setup, I&#x27;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.<p>Instead of viewing them as a chore, I&#x27;m now actually excited to do my Anki reviews every morning-- where they used to make me mentally exhausted, they&#x27;re now a warm-up that gets my brain started for the day.