Tips

• General Advice
• Dealing With Lists in Anki - an Algorithm

General Advice

What follows are a number of tips drawn from Piotr Wozniaks 20 rules of formulating knowledge and my own experiences over the past few months of using a simpler version of this add-on. They are by no means complete or exhaustive, but might provide some helpful insights for those starting with the add-on or Anki in general.

Avoid Lists Whenever You Can

Not that Cloze Overlapper is a bad tool, but technical solutions like this add-on or even Anki itself are no substitute for letting your mind process and synthesize the information at hand. Your brain is great at identifying patterns and connections which might not be obvious at first. Use this to your advantage to break up, categorize, or reorder information, before resorting to rote memorization of an entire list.

Follow Natural Sequences

Overlapping cloze deletions are at their most effective when the items follow a natural order. Be it a chronological sequence, a spatial relation, or a simple frequency of occurrence - try to find that natural sequence and follow it!

Any Type of Order Is Better than No Order at All

Unordered lists are notoriously hard to retain in memory, even with tools like Cloze Overlapper at your disposal. In the absense of a natural order, try to find a different way to sort the items. Resort to artifical sorting criteria if you have to! Obvious choices might be to sort your items alphabetically, or go by the number of sub-elements if you are dealing with a list of lists.

This might also be a good point to think about utilizing more advanced memory techniques like mnemonics, the chain method, or the method of loci. They should help you build associations where there usually are none.

I'm not very familiar with using the latter two, so if you do end up integrating the add-on with any of these techniques I'd love to hear about your experiences!

Dealing With Lists in Anki - an Algorithm

Using the points above, you can construct a mental algorithm that will help you decide how to process lists and enumerations in Anki. Something like this is what I currently use:

1. Can the list be split-up into categories?

   • Yes
     1. ⇒ Create a note for the category list and
        • < 3 items: consider using a basic note
        • ≥ 3 items: consider using an overlapping cloze. Proceed with 2 for the category list.
     2. ⇒ Create a note for each category
        • < 3 items: consider using a basic note
        • ≥ 3 items: consider using an overlapping cloze. Proceed with 2 for each category.
   • No
     • Proceed with 2 for the entire list

2. Does the list follow a logical sequence?

   • Yes
     • ⇒ use Cloze Overlapper directly.
   • No
     • ⇒ Proceed with 3.

3. Can the list be artificially aligned to a meaningful sequence?

   1. Can you correlate the items to a temporal or spatial order? (e.g. order of appearance, anatomical axes, method of loci)?
      • ⇒ use Cloze Overlapper, while hinting at the sequence criterion in the question prompt (e.g. "from top to bottom")
   2. Can you think of a good mnemonic?
      1. ⇒ Create a basic note prompting for the mnemonic and
      2. ⇒ use Cloze Overlapper
   3. Is there any other memorization technique you can employ?
      1. ⇒ create additional notes as necessary and
      2. ⇒ use Cloze Overlapper
   4. None of the above?
      • ⇒ Proceed with 4.

4. Can the list be artificially aligned to an arbitrary sequence?

   1. Can the list be sorted alphabetically?
   2. Can the list be sorted by string length?
   3. Can the list be sorted by the number of sub-elements?
   4. etc.

   Either way: Proceed with 5

5. Cram the list as many times as you can and hope for the best