So there’s a need for an intermediate stage between creating an extract and creating a flashcard. This need is what progressive highlighting seeks to address.
I haven’t actually done incremental reading in SuperMemo so I’m not sure about this, but I believe extract processing is meant to be recursive: first you extract a larger portion of the text that seems relevant, then when you encounter it again the extract itself is treated like an original article itself, so you might extract just a single sentence, then when you encounter that sentence again you might make a cloze deletion or Q&A card.
I guess the “funnel model” of reading doesn’t seem quite right to me somehow? Like, I want to actually read all the words. I think they’re probably almost all important at first for getting the meaning across to me. Not to mention the larger sections—of course I want to read those.
It’s just that I know that without a kind of swallow-it-whole approach to reading that is akin to extremely massed practice, I will really struggle to remember the bits, much less tie them together into a cohesive, synthesized form of larger meaning.
So their model seems to be a progressive approach to narrowing down and re-reading that eventually arrives at making flashcards, which then are used to maintain knowledge over the long term.
My model is more like a shallow goldfish read that quickly arrives at flashcards, crystallizes the important bits of knowledge, and then proceeds to re-reading in order to arrive at fuller understanding. I think the swap is in the order of flashcards vs. re-reading—they recommend re-reading before making flash-cards, while I recommend making and practicing with flash-cards before re-reading.
I haven’t actually done incremental reading in SuperMemo so I’m not sure about this, but I believe extract processing is meant to be recursive: first you extract a larger portion of the text that seems relevant, then when you encounter it again the extract itself is treated like an original article itself, so you might extract just a single sentence, then when you encounter that sentence again you might make a cloze deletion or Q&A card.
I guess the “funnel model” of reading doesn’t seem quite right to me somehow? Like, I want to actually read all the words. I think they’re probably almost all important at first for getting the meaning across to me. Not to mention the larger sections—of course I want to read those.
It’s just that I know that without a kind of swallow-it-whole approach to reading that is akin to extremely massed practice, I will really struggle to remember the bits, much less tie them together into a cohesive, synthesized form of larger meaning.
So their model seems to be a progressive approach to narrowing down and re-reading that eventually arrives at making flashcards, which then are used to maintain knowledge over the long term.
My model is more like a shallow goldfish read that quickly arrives at flashcards, crystallizes the important bits of knowledge, and then proceeds to re-reading in order to arrive at fuller understanding. I think the swap is in the order of flashcards vs. re-reading—they recommend re-reading before making flash-cards, while I recommend making and practicing with flash-cards before re-reading.