I’ve started a weekly habit of flashcard review. I want to share with you my thought process for modifying my cards, because I think this will be valuable to help you improve your own knowledge construction skills.
I also want my flashcard development out in the open so you can call me out when I make mistakes and provide suggestions for further improvements. Please do reach out! I am by no means the ultimate expert in knowledge construction.
So, I will be doing a regular series I call “Flashcard Refactoring” (Refactoring comes from the programming term which basically means revising and improving your code).
To sniff out poor flashcards, I ran prop:lapses>7 in the Anki browser to get all the cards I’ve forgotten over 7 times. Here’s one I came across about a command in the Linux command line to a suspend a job:
- Side 1: ^Z (Linux Command Line)
- Side 2: Suspend a job running in the foreground (Linux Command Line)
The card is reversible, so are two cards in total: one with Side 1 as the question, and another with Side 2 as the question.
At first glance, it doesn’t look too bad. It’s fairly concise. But one quick and easy change is reduce words in Side 2, in accordance with the 12th rule of Formulating Knowledge (“Optimize Wording”):
- Side 2: Suspend foreground job (Linux Command Line)
This is a nice little improvement, but why am I really forgetting this card? I think it’s because ^Z doesn’t really have any meaning – it seems arbitrary and it has no clear connection to suspending foreground jobs.
So, I’ll create a fake connection, i.e. a mnemonic.
The mnemonic that immediately came to mind was the fact that the beginning of “Suspend” kind of sounds like a “Z”, e.g. “Zuspend”. I think this is all that’s required for this to stick in my memory (but only time will tell).
When you come up with a mnemonic, it’s a good idea to create a separate card for it, so I added the following to my deck:
- Q: Mnemonic for remembering ^Z suspends foreground job in Linux Command Line.
- A: Zuspend