Why use cloze on very long texts?

Question

Blacky372 asked:

In this video, you clozed pieces of information on medium sized extracts, sometimes spanning multiple sentences or even paragraphs, and removed the unnecessary context or uninteresting parts later in the specific cloze items instead of splitting the clozes further up beforehand. Do you recommend this as a general strategy or is this part of your style or the kind of material you read?

Answer

If you use a very long text for cloze deletion, you need to balance cost and benefit:

• you gain a lot of time on NOT editing the text (at the moment)
• you spend more time when editing texts later on

This is why your decisions will depend on circumstances. For example:

• if the text is of low priority, editing it much later will be a form of review
• if the text contains many cloze deletions, simplifying it before cloze will save a lot of time
• if you struggle with comprehension, incremental simplification may help you build the understanding

In other words, you need a lot of practice to fully understand the implications of editing now or in the future. All those decisions are highly individual and depend on your interest and priorities.

The simplest rule of thumb: if the items is hard to understand, and low priority, and you do just one cloze, edit it later. If the item is top priority, and you generate lots of cloze deletions, simplify before cloze.

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