Why so many clozes in incremental reading?

From: dragon
Country: {{{Country}}}
Sent: Mar 22, 2018
Subject: comments on IR video

Question:

I love your introduction on Supermemo (video). However, do you mind explaining why you're doing what you're doing, instead of just demonstrating it? Because I couldn't understand what you're trying to do, except highlighting sentences after sentences and cloze a lot of key words throughout the whole video. Anyway, I appreciate your contribution:)

Hints

This will be re-analyzed. in the meantime, you could write at which point you have doubts. it is often hard to get another user's perspective. everyone would proceed differently with the same material, so all decisions are very individual and the key commonalities are: extract + cloze. The rest depends on the text and user's

Answer:

The video is not an introduction to SuperMemo. For a fast intro, you could read Incremental reading: First steps. This video is only to give you a "feel" of how easy it is to process a seemingly intimidating article. The main point is that there are just a few simple operations and big portions of the text can be scheduled for later. The whole war in the western front can then be processed in 20 min. or even faster.

The number of clozes and their choice are highly individual. In this case, it was suppose to show that you need just 1-2 clozes per paragraph, while at school, before an exam, you would rather be expected to "know everything", which is not rational. Naturally, if the subject is new to you, you can do fewer clozes or even process the text passively. However, the later case would not make for video material. You could then say that the number of clozes was moderate for that degree of detail in processing.

This text and video are used to explain SuperMemo, a pioneer of spaced repetition software since 1987. For other videos see: SuperMemo Video