Is incremental reading good for non-Wikipedia articles?
From: Monika
Country: Poland
Sent: July 16, 2018
Subject: struggling with incremental reading
Question:
I need to learn about investing and found a website that I love: "the balance". However, I have no idea how to tackle those articles in incremental reading. I love to read the site, but the same articles in incremental reading I hate. I just do not even know where to start. How to extract? What to cloze? Please, just do not answer "Wikipedia is better". I know your FAQs and your thinking, but I just do not understand finance and economics at Wikipedia. There is too much specialist terminology. I really want to read this (for example):
https://www.thebalance.com/treasury-yields-3305741
Please give me a step by step. For example, could you make it into a video? I like your videos, but they do not apply. You only show how to work with Wikipedia.
Please do not tell me that I need more experience. I started incremental reading many years ago (on and off). You need to give me more specifics.
Answer:
Incremental reading is universal
Incremental reading is great for any high quality text material. Your text is not perfect, and may be a bit harder than just reading fact-rich Wikipedia. Here is a video that shows the difficulties in processing this particular text.
Wikipedia vs. incremental writing
The main advantage of Wikipedia is that it is highly "granular". This means that individual sentences often carry all necessary context to be understood. This come from granular editing. An editor may wish to change punctuation without delving into the rest of the article. If the sentence is unclear, the editor may wish to modify it slightly to make it clearer. This promotes further granularity, and collective editing. Wikipedia editing is like incremental writing deprived of collective long-term associative memory. In other words, Wikipedia does not reside in a single human brain to ensure its coherence. However, it still provides the best material for incremental reading to build coherent knowledge in associative long-term memory of the student.
Other remarks
- some "prose" is not suitable for incremental reading
- step-by-step video about incremental reading is not possible. Every user has his own strategy and needs. No two runs through the article will be similar
- you need to master all skills of incremental reading and then get lots of practice. You do not need to read about treasury yields at Wikipedia, but you can start with simpler things, and only then move on to harder stuff (like your article)
- if there is a huge knowledge gap between the reader and the author, it may be hard to bridge without solid incremental reading experience. You may need a lot of supplementary material, delay, prioritization, strategic cloze, etc. The author may simply take some things for granted
- there are some minor error and structure problems with the article. An article can be nice and easy to read, but even minor structure problems will show up in incremental reading ruthlessly. For example, the yield curve is not well defined (it links to another longer article). The text later uses the terms normal and inverted yield curve, which compounds the problem. In other words, unless you are a pro in the field, you will need supplementary Wikipedia articles to build comprehension
This text and video are used to explain SuperMemo, a pioneer of spaced repetition software since 1987. For other videos see: SuperMemo Video