How to write a card

Understand before memorizing. Do not card a sentence you cannot explain. If the chapter is still muddy, wait.

A card is one fact. If a sentence has two things worth remembering, write two cards.

The front has to stand alone. Weeks later, with only that question on the screen, you should know exactly what to recall. Put the context in the question. Not in the deck name.

Ask for recall, not recognition. “What is X?” beats “X is __ (true/false)”.

Keep the back short. A word. A phrase. A tight sentence. Extra nuance waits behind the answer. It is not the answer.

Do not write list cards. “Name all the causes of the French Revolution” is a bad card. Split it.

Do not copy a paragraph onto the back. If you cannot turn a passage into questions, skip it.

Prefer the words already used. If the conversation named it well, keep that wording.

Cloze only when the sentence itself is the point. Do not punch holes in a long paragraph.

Tag lightly. A few real topics beat a dozen guesses. Say where it came from. A chat. A chapter. A PDF.

New cards from an agent wait in Inbox. Do not invent facts. Do not make cards nobody asked to remember. If you are not sure, ask.

Two-way for definitions and notation (term↔definition, notation↔meaning). Pairs exist now via reverse: true. Not for every fact. The app does not invent reverses.

Brief cards; deck-level redundancy is good. One card stays small. The deck may repeat a fact from another angle. That is not a violation of one fact.

Card verified insights, not only the source text. Do not invent. Do not card a guess. If you inferred something and checked it, that can be a card.

Good

Front: In Spanish, what is the first-person present of comer? Back: como

Front: What does FSRS stand for? Back: Free Spaced Repetition Scheduler

Bad

Front: comer Back: to eat, yo como, tú comes, list of all tenses…

Front: Summarize chapter 4 Back: a paragraph

Front: True or false: Paris is the capital of France. Back: true

Then you study. How you study. How a deck gets cards is Start with an agent.

These rules follow Fernando Borretti, Effective Spaced Repetition, and Piotr Woźniak, Twenty rules of formulating knowledge.