Incremental reading: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 14:53, 1 February 2015

Introduction

Traditional linear reading is highly inefficient. This comes from the fact that various pieces of the text are of various importance. Some should be skipped. Others should be read in the first order of priority. Old-fashioned books are quickly being replaced with hypertext. Hypertext will help you quickly jump to information that is the most important at any given moment. Hypertext requires a different style of writing. All linear texts can assume that the reader is familiar with the preceding sections. This makes them context-poor. Within hypertext, individual texts become context-independent, and all difficult terms and concepts are explained primarily with additional hyperlinks. In the same way in which the web helped delinearize the global sources of information, SuperMemo can help you delinearize your reading of whatever linear material you decide to import to SuperMemo. While reading with SuperMemo, you will see a linear text as a sequence of sections subdivided into paragraphs and individual sentences. SuperMemo will help you provide a separate and independent processing for each section, paragraph or sentence.

What is incremental reading?

Incremental reading is a learning technique that makes it possible to read thousands of articles at the same time without getting lost. Incremental reading begins with importing articles from electronic sources, e.g. the Internet. The student then extracts the most important fragments of individual articles for further review. Extracted fragments are then converted into questions and answers. These in turn become subject to systematic review and repetition that maximizes the long-term recall. The review process is handled by the proven spaced repetition algorithm known as the SuperMemo method.

Incremental reading converts electronic articles into durable knowledge in your memory. This conversion requires minimum keyboard&mouse work:

Input: electronic articles (e.g. collected from the net)
Output: well-remembered knowledge (quizzed regularly in the form of questions and answers)

In incremental reading, you read articles in small portions. After you read a portion of one article, you go on to a portion of another article, etc. You introduce all important portions of texts into the learning process in SuperMemo. This way you do not worry that you forget the main thread of the article, even if you return to reading months later. Your progress with individual articles may be slow, but you greatly increase your efficiency by paying less attention to less important articles and spending more time on articles that are more beneficial to your knowledge. Difficult articles may wait until you read easier explanatory articles, etc. Last but not least, incremental reading increases your efficiency because it is fun! You never get bored. If you do not like an article, you read just a sentence and jump to other articles. This way your attention and focus stay maximized.

Warning! Incremental reading may seem complex at first. However, once you master it, you will begin a learning process that will surpass your expectations. You will be surprised with the volume of data your memory can process and retain!

Five basic skills of incremental reading

Incremental reading requires skills that you will perfect only over months and years of use. This overview will only help you master the basic skills and help you make a start with incremental reading. The 5 basic skills are:

importing articles to SuperMemo
reading articles and decomposing articles into manageable pieces
converting most important pieces of knowledge into question-answer material
review of the material to ensure good recall
handling of the unavoidable overflow of information

Skill 1: Importing articles

Five article import methods

Initially, you may limit your imports to a simple copy&paste of individual articles. Later, you will want to master automatic imports from the web that offer many advantages.

Here are the 5 main article import methods in SuperMemo:

Copy&Paste: select a text of an article in the browser (or any other application that allows of copying texts), copy it to the clipboard, and copy it to SuperMemo with a single keystroke: Alt+N
Mass import: use a dedicated web import option to import many articles from Internet Explorer. This methods allows of avoiding duplicate imports, marks your imports with references, imports only selected portions of texts, and offers many other advantages.
Dedicated imports: SuperMemo makes it particularly easy to import material from Wikipedia (the recommended source of basic incremental reading materials) and from YouTube (a source of incremental video materials)
Local file imports: import files that you have already collected on your hard disk
Mail imports: for incremental processing of your mail

Import by Copy&Paste

To import an article with copy and paste, follow these steps:

Select the imported text in your web browser and copy the selection to the clipboard (e.g. with Ctrl+C)
Switch to SuperMemo (e.g. with Alt+Tab)
In SuperMemo, press Ctrl+N (this is equivalent to Edit : Add a new article on the main menu). SuperMemo will create a new element, and paste the article. You can also use the Paste an article button () on the learnbar or on the Read toolbar
Optionally, use Alt+P to define priority of the imported article. Use the Percent field and remember that 0% is the highest priority, while 100% is the lowest priority
Optionally, use Ctrl+J to specify the first review interval. For example: one day for high priority material or 30 days for low priority material

Please remember that if you have many articles opened in Internet Explorer, you can most easily import them with web import as described in the next section.

Import of multiple articles

The most convenient way to import learning materials to SuperMemo is a direct import of multiple articles right from the web. To import many articles at the same time, open these articles in Internet Explorer, and click the import button on the learnbar (or press Ctrl+Shift+A, or chose Edit : Import web pages on the main menu). To avoid importing advertising and other garbage, in Internet Explorer, select portions of the text that is to be imported. If you select texts before imports, you are less likely to need filters to get rid of troublesome HTML (F6). If you prefer to use other browsers, e.g. Chrome or Firefox, you will need to use Copy&Paste method, or re-open the selected articles in Internet Explorer. This is because, at the moment, SuperMemo supports direct imports only from Internet Explorer.

For more details on importing multiple articles see: Web import

Dedicated imports (Wikipedia, YouTube, and pictures)

The most popular sources of learning materials are Wikipedia (for incremental reading) and YouTube (for incremental video). For those sources, you have separate options available on the import menu (right click on the Paste an article button on the learnbar). You can also use shortcuts Ctrl+Shift+W (Wikipedia) and Ctrl+Shift+Y (YouTube) to import from those two sources. If you choose those options, only articles available from those sources will be displayed on the import list. Additionally, a dedicated filter will best prepare the imported pages for convenient learning.

After importing an article about the greenhouse effect from Wikipedia (e.g. with Edit : Import web pages : Wikipedia (Shift+Ctrl+W)), its entire text is stored in a single topic.

If you want to import pictures, you can also use a picture filter that will ignore all non-picture pages opened in Internet Explorer. Use Import pictures on the Paste an article button menu on the learnbar (right click). You can also click Filter : Pictures in the web import dialog when importing pages (e.g. with Ctrl+Shift+A).

For more details see: Web import

Importing articles from local files

If you want to import articles from files that reside on your local drive, you can use the following methods:

Single article from Internet Explorer into a new element
1. open the local article in Internet Explorer
2. import in the same way as you import articles from the web (e.g. Import by Copy&Paste or Import of multiple articles)
Single article from local drive into a new element
1. use Edit : Add to category : HTML file on the main menu
Single article into existing HTML component
1. choose File : Import file on the HTML component menu
Multiple articles (stored in a single folder)
1. use File : Import : Files and folders
2. point to the folder that contains the articles (make sure no other files are stored in the folder or its subfolders, otherwise, they will also get imported to SuperMemo)

Skill 2: Reading articles

Here is a simplified algorithm for reading articles:

Choose an article: Import an article as explained earlier or bring up previously imported articles with Learn (Ctrl+L). Learn will display only articles imported in the past. If you import an article, and want to have it shown later during a learning session on the same day, you must place it in the outstanding queue (e.g. Learning : Later today on the element menu, Ctrl+Shift+J, etc.). If you import many articles that you want to process on the same day, you must place them all in the outstanding queue. For example, open the articles in the browser, and choose Learning : Add all to outstanding (or use Add to outstanding icon on the browser toolbar). Most of the time you can rely solely on Learn to schedule articles optimally for review.
Click the article to enter the editing mode, in which you can modify text, select fragments, etc. Optionally, use filter F6, if the text is hard to process (e.g. selections are hard, extracts not marked correctly, etc.)
Start reading the article from the top or from the last read point (i.e. a bookmark left in the text last time you read it)
Extract texts: If you encounter an interesting text in the article, select it and choose Remember extract on the learnbar (or press Alt+X). This operation will introduce the extracted fragment into the learning process as an independent mini-article. If you would like to specify the priority of the new extract, choose Reading : Schedule extract () instead of Remember extract. Also, if you have an impression that the article is difficult and you would like to read some fragments later, extract those fragments with Reading : Schedule extract and provide a review interval that will reflect the time you believe you will be better equipped to understand the extracted fragment.
Optionally, use Delete before cursor (Alt+\). This will delete the text that you have read, clean up the article, remove garbage, and help tackle HTML that is difficult to process.
Optionally, if you read a fragment that seems unimportant, select it (e.g. with the mouse) and either delete it (e.g. with the Del key) or mark it with the ignore style. To mark a text as ignore, choose Reading : Ignore on the component menu, click the Ignore text button () on the Read toolbar, or just press Ctrl+Shift+I.
Optionally, if the selected fragment does not include all the important reading context, you can add this context manually. For example, if you are learning history, you may extract the following fragment from an article about Lincoln: On Sept. 22, 1862, President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, one of the most important messages in the history of the world. He signed it Jan. 1, 1863. If you would like to extract the fragment related to signing the Emancipation Proclamation, you will need to change He to Lincoln and it to Emancipation Proclamation so that your stand-alone fragment is understandable: Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863. You can use the Reference options on the component menu to easily add context to your extracts (see: References). Context added by Reference will be added automatically to all extracts of a given article. For example, select the text that you want to serve as the reference title of all extracts and choose Reference : Title on the HTML component menu (or press Alt+T). This text will appear at the bottom of all extracts (in reference pink font by default).
Optionally, mark your last read point: Once you decide to stop reading the article before its end, mark the last processed fragment as the read-point (e.g. with Ctrl+F7 or by choosing Reading : Read-points : Set read-point from the HTML component menu). Next time you come back to this same article, SuperMemo will highlight your read-point and you will be able to resume reading from the point you last stopped reading the article. To go to your current read point, press Alt+F7. If you forget to set a read-point, SuperMemo will leave a read-point at the place of your last extract or last highlight.
Go to the next article: After you finish reading a portion of one article, choose Learn or Next repetition to proceed with reading other articles. Those buttons are located at the bottom of the element window. You can also use Enter, which will work as long as the selection in the text is not empty (e.g. marked as a reading point), or if you have left the editing mode (e.g. with Esc). If no text is selected, Enter will add a new line in the text (as is the case with standard text editors).
Optionally, determine the next review date (e.g. with Ctrl+Shift+R), or set the new priority for the article (e.g. with Alt+P).
In incremental reading, interrupted reading is a rule, not an exception! With a dose of practice, you will quickly get accustomed to this not-so-natural state of affairs and learn to appreciate the power of the incremental approach. The main role of interruption is to prevent the decline in the quality of reading. Use the following criteria to decide when to stop reading the article:
- lack of time: if you still have many articles for review for a given day and your time is running out, keep your increments shorter. After some time, being in a hurry will be a norm and you will tend to read only 1-2 paragraphs of each article and dig deeper only into groundbreaking articles that will powerfully affect your knowledge.
- boredom: if the article tends to make you bored, stop reading. Your attention span is always limited. If your focus is poor, you will benefit more from the article if you return to it after some break. Go on to reading something that you are not yet tired of. If SuperMemo schedules the next review at a date you consider too late, use Ctrl+J or Shift+Ctrl+R to adjust the next review date.
- lack of understanding: if you feel you need more knowledge before you are able to understand the article, postpone it (e.g. use Ctrl+J or Shift+Ctrl+R and schedule the next review in 100 days or so). If you believe you have already imported articles with relevant explanatory knowledge, you can search for these articles (e.g. with Ctrl+F). Once you find them, you can (1) execute a subset review, or (2) add the articles to the outstanding queue for reading on the same day, or (3) advance the articles (for example, in the browser, you can execute: Learning : Review all, or Learning : Add to outstanding, or Advance : Topics). If you have not yet imported any explanatory articles, you can do it now (e.g. search the web and import articles as explained before). Note that you can select a piece of text in SuperMemo and use Ctrl+F3 to search encyclopedias or dictionaries for more material on a given subject.
- lower priority: read lower priority articles in smaller portions thus reducing the overall time allocation to low priority subjects.
- overload: if you have a long queue of articles to read, you will naturally read in smaller portions
Once you complete reading the entire article and have extracted all the interesting fragments, choose Done! () on the learnbar. You can also press Shift+Ctrl+Enter, choose Done! in the Commander, or choose Learning : Done on the element menu. Done! will dismiss the article, i.e. remove it from the review process, and delete its contents (without deleting the extracted material). Done will delete a childless article (i.e. an article that did not provide any interesting extract). Using Done will greatly reduce the size of your collection and eliminate "dead hits" when searching for texts.

The Read toolbar docked at the learnbar. It hosts options used in incremental reading.

Figure: The Read toolbar docked at the learnbar. It hosts options used in incremental reading. For details see: Read toolbar

Skill 3: Extracting fragments, questions and answers

Extracting texts

In the course of traditional reading, we often mark important paragraphs with a highlighter pen. In SuperMemo, those paragraphs can be extracted as separate mini-articles that will later be used to refresh your memory. Each extracted paragraph or section becomes a new element that will be subject to the same reading algorithm as the original article. Extract important fragments and single sentences with Extract (). Use Alt+X, Extract on the learnbar, or Extract on the Read toolbar.

Adding references

Why need references?

In incremental reading, you always need to quickly recover the context of a question or a piece of text. The easiest way to recover context quickly is via references. References propagate from element to element as you produce extracts and cloze deletions. With all child elements produced from a given text marked with references, you would never need to worry about losing the context of the question.

For example:

Q: He was born in [...](year)

cannot be answered without the context. However, the following question is already easier to understand:

Q: He was born in [...](year)

#Title: Barrack Obama
#Source: Wikipedia

To speed up learning, in the incremental reading process, the above question should naturally be replaced with:

Q: Obama was born in [...](year)

or

Q: Obama was born in [...](year)

#Title: Barrack Obama
#Source: Wikipedia

References are not stored in HTML files that hold your articles but in a reference registry (i.e. in a separate database). The reference registry does not hold the text of references either. All reference texts are held in the text registry and are available for global text searches. In earlier versions of SuperMemo, each text would keep its own copy of references. In newer SuperMemos, elements keep only pointers to reference registry, which in turn keeps pointers to individual text fields in the text registry. As a result, many elements can hold the same reference, and many references can hold the same text. This results in a significant saving in space in your collection. More importantly, you can update the reference in a single element and see the change show in all elements using the same reference. This way, you do not need to waste time on search&replace to correct a single misspelling or reference inaccuracy that propagated to many elements.

Example: references inserted automatically

If you select the title of the source article and press Alt+T (Reference : Title on the HTML component menu), each extract will be marked by the title of the source article. If you use File : Import web pages : All, your articles will be provided with basic references (such as #Title, #Link, #Date, etc.). If you need more context (e.g. to add the author, the journal, etc.), you can use the Reference link button () on the navigation bar to jump to the source article from which the extract was produced. On the parent article, that button will lead you to the original link on the net.

Figure: Typical snapshot of incremental reading. While learning about the greenhouse effect, the student extracts the fragment saying that "In the absence of the greenhouse effect and an atmosphere, the Earth's average surface temperature of 14 °C could be as low as -18 °C, the black body temperature of the Earth.". The extracted fragment will inherit illustrations placed on the right, as well as article references. The student can move on to reading another article by pressing Enter. The picture on the right is stored locally in the image registry (on the user's hard disk) and can be reused to illustrate other articles or questions.

Reference tips

To mark texts as reference fields use the Reference submenu on the HTML component menu (e.g. Reference : Select or Alt+Q)
Reference fields #Article, #Parent and #Category are added automatically and are not stored in the reference registry. These fields are not generated in elements that have no other reference fields defined
References marked with Alt+Q options show up in the reference field and can be deleted from the text's body (if no longer needed)
SuperMemo differentiates between the following 2 types of references edits:
- local edits that affect only the present element and create a new reference record vs.
- global edits which change the original reference in all the elements that use it.

When SuperMemo is not sure if your edits are local or global, it will ask you

You can edit references in the reference area or in a dedicated window that you can open by choosing Reference : Edit from the element menu. You only need to use legal reference field tags at the beginning of each reference line (e.g. #Author:). If SuperMemo is not sure if your changes should apply to the current element only, or to all elements that use the reference, it will ask you

Important! Do not add your own non-reference texts below the horizontal bar marking the reference area. All reference field area is owned by SuperMemo. Any modifications to that area will be treated as changes to reference fields. Changes that do not conform with reference field formatting will be discarded without warning.

Figure: An extract from an article on sleep and dreaming. Blue marks an extract produced from the presented text. Yellow marks the search string (i.e. GABA-ergic REM-on neurons) that was used in Search : Find elements (Ctrl+F) to find all the elements (including this one) containing the string. Pink marks the reference area (consisting of the #Title, #Author, #Date, #Source, #Article, #Parent, and #Category fields), which will propagate to all children elements (extracts and clozes) generated from this element.

Editing references

You an use Reference : Edit in SuperMemo Commander, however, you can also edit references in the reference area (which is pink in the default stylesheet). You can safely delete reference fields, but you need to decide if that change should be local (for that element only) or global (for all elements using this reference). You will not be able to delete #Article or #Category fields because they are added automatically to the reference section (i.e. they are not part of the reference itself). You can freely change the text of references. Illegal changes are all changes that do not comply with the reference format, e.g. lines that do not start with reference field tags, or lines that start with unknown reference field tags (e.g. #Country). If you are unsure how this process works, import a single article from Wikipedia to a newly created collection, create some extracts and play with editing to see how references are processed.

Cloze: Generating questions

SuperMemo will show you that extracting important fragments and reviewing them at later time will have an excellent impact on your ability to remember. However, it will also show that once the time between reviews increases beyond 200-300 days, reading and re-reading (passive review) will often result in insufficient recall. For this reason, sooner or later, you will need to convert your texts to specific questions. For that purpose you will use cloze deletion.

A cloze deletion is an item that uses an ellipsis ([...]) to replace a part of a sentence.

For example:

Question: The capital of Sierra Leone is [...]
Answer: Freetown

In incremental reading, cloze deletions are generated from topics that have a form of a sentence or a simple paragraph.

To create a cloze deletion do the following:

make sure a topic contains a short sentence only (e.g. The capital of Sierra Leone is Freetown)
select an important keyword in that sentence (e.g. Freetown)
do one of the following:
- click the Cloze button () on the Read toolbar, or
- press Alt+Z, or
- choose Reading : Remember cloze from the HTML component menu.

Remember cloze will convert a sentence into a specific question with an answer. By using cloze, you will move from passive review to active recall. You do not need to wait until a paragraph or a sentence becomes hard to recall in passive review. For your most important material, you can create cloze items immediately after finding a piece of information that you need to remember well.

The examples below show how to effectively use Remember cloze.

Figure: Two numbers from the extracted sentence are used as keywords for generating questions and answers (temperatures of 14 °C and -18 °C)

Figure: The sentence extracted during incremental reading (see the previous picture) is converted into a cloze deletion. (i.e. a question-answer pair forming the final product of incremental reading used in strengthening the memory of a given fact (here: hypothetical temperature on Earth devoid of atmosphere)). The picture from the original extract has been inherited (on the right). Pink texts at the bottom of the question are references generated automatically when importing an article from Wikipedia.

When you click Cloze, you will not see your newly generated cloze. Only the selected keyword will change the color. This will speed up your work. However, if you would like to immediately edit the newly created cloze deletion, choose the back button () on the navigation bar or press Alt+Left arrow. This will make it possible to add context clues, shorten the text, improve the wording, etc.

Simplifying questions

While converting extracts into questions and answers, you should make sure your questions are simple, clear and carrying the relevant context. For example, if you have extracted the following fragment from your reading about the history of the Internet:

The Internet was started in 1969 under acontract let by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) which connected four major computers at universities in the southwestern US (UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UCSB, and the University of Utah)

you may discover that when review intervals become long enough, you may not actually be able to recall the name of the ARPA agency or even forget the year in which the Internet started. You can then select an important keyword, e.g. 1969, and use Remember cloze to produce the following question-answer pair:

Question: The Internet was started in [...] under a contract let by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) which connected four major computers at universities in the southwestern US (UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UCSB, and the University of Utah)
Answer: 1969

In the course of learning, you will need to polish the above item by manual editing it to a more compact and understandable form:

Question: The Internet was started in [...](year) under a contract let by the ARPA agency
Answer: 1969

Or better yet:

Question: The Internet was started in [...](year)

Answer: 1969

As for the precious information "lost" during the editing, it can (but does not have to) be learned independently with separate questions generated by Remember cloze.

The mini-editing of questions presented above added the following benefits to the newly created question-answer pair:

clearer purpose of the question: the fact that the question is about the year in which the Internet began is emphasized by using the red-colored (year) hint.
brevity: by removing superfluous information, you will not waste time on information that is not likely to be remembered (only actively recalled material will be remembered for years). You will answer the question and never focus on which universities were originally connected by the early Internet. If you believe this information is also important, you will use the original extract to produce more cloze items that will focus solely on the universities in question by naming them in the answer field (if you disagree, read: 20 rules of formulating knowledge).
understandability: "the ARPA agency" phrase may defy grammar rules you have learned in primary school, but it is by far more understandable than just the ARPA. In SuperMemo, understandability is more important than stiff rules of grammar or spelling!

Skill 4: Repetition and review

SuperMemo is based on repetition. You will review the learned material from time to time to make sure you prevent forgetting.

If you have never tried SuperMemo before, you will need to get the hang of standard repetitions as described here.

In incremental reading, your review will be based on similar principles as in classical SuperMemo. The main differences are:

the learning process will intermingle reading of new articles with reviewing your items
your items will mostly have a form of cloze deletions, i.e. sentences with a question posed by a missing part [...] (e.g. The planet nearest the Sun is [...])
as the entire learning process is incremental, your cloze deletions will often show up in an unfinished form

Incrementally processed articles will be subject to periodic review/reading. When you resume reading an article after a certain period, you will proceed to new sections, extracting newly acquired wisdom into separate elements with Alt+X (i.e. Remember extract). Usually, you will delete the remnants of the processed article with Delete before cursor (Alt+\).

The algorithms that determine the timing of (1) repetitions of question-and-answer material and (2) reviewing reading material are analogous but not identical. Most importantly, all repetitions and article presentations happen in increasing intervals by default. In incremental reading, you will see a constant inflow of new articles into your collection. Unprocessed material will need to compete with the newly imported material. Increasing review intervals make sure that your old material fades into lower priority if not processed early. The speed of processing will depend on the availability of your time and the value of the material itself. Articles that are boring, badly written, less important for your work or growth, will receive smaller portions of your attention and may go into long review intervals before you even manage to pass a fraction of the text. That is an inevitable side effect of a voluminous flow of new information into your collection and into your memory. However, intervals and priorities can easily be adjusted. If your priorities change, you can modify the way you process important articles. At review time, you can either read the entire article without interruption, or bring it back for review in a shorter interval. You can manually change its priority (e.g. with Alt+P). You can also use search tools (e.g. Ctrl+F) to locate more articles on the subject that you feel you have neglected. You can reprioritize a bunch of articles by changing their priority. You can shorten intervals of articles, or review them all when needed (see: Subset review).

The algorithm for reviewing questions and answers (e.g. cloze deletions) is quite complex and limits your influence on the timing of repetitions (see: SuperMemo Algorithm). This is to ensure that you achieve a high level of knowledge retention, which might be compromised by manual intervention. However, the algorithm for determining inter-review intervals for topics is much simpler and is entirely under your control. Each article receives a specific priority. The priority determines which articles are reviewed first and which can be postponed in case you run out of time. Each article is also assigned a number called the A-Factor that determines how much intervals increase between subsequent reviews. For example, if A-Factor is 2, review intervals will double with each review. Priority and A-Factors are set automatically, but you can change them manually at any time. You can also set priorities for individual categories of the learning material. Priorities and A-Factors are determined and modified heuristically on the basis of the length of the text, the way it is processed, the way it is postponed or advanced, and by many other factors. You can change the priority and A-Factor of an article by pressing Alt+P. You can also use Shift+Ctrl+Up arrow and Shift+Ctrl+Down arrow to increase or decrease an element's priority. Note that A-Factors associated with items cannot be changed by the user, as they are a reflection of item difficulty that determines the length of optimum inter-repetition intervals (see: Forgetting index).

You can control the timing of article review by manually adjusting inter-review intervals. Use Ctrl+J (Reschedule) or Shift+Ctrl+R (Execute repetition) to determine the date of the next review. Ctrl+J will increment the current interval, while Shift+Ctrl+R will first execute a repetition and then set the new interval. For example, if your current interval is 100 and you specify the value of 3 in Reschedule, your new repetition date will be set in 3 days, and the last repetition date will not change (the new interval will be 103). If you do the same with Execute repetition, your new interval will be 3 and the last repetition date will be set to today. In other words, Reschedule increments the interval (it can also shorten intervals), while Execute repetition sets the length of the interval (while leaving a trace of a repetition executed in the learning process). Note that Reschedule executed during the repetition cycle will first complete the repetition and will have the same effect as Execute repetition.

In a heavily overloaded incremental reading process, you will often want to focus on a specific subject on a given day. For that purpose, read about the priceless concept of subset learning.

Summary

use the Learn button to process, learn, and review all your knowledge
the review of items is handled by the SuperMemo Algorithm. Grade your items well, formulate them well, and mark them with honest priorities. SuperMemo will take care of the rest
review of topics/articles also occurs in increasing intervals, however, you can always manually set the next date with Execute repetition (Shift+Ctrl+R). Make sure you mark your top articles with high priority. Otherwise, they can quickly fade from view

Skill 5: Handling large volumes of knowledge

In incremental reading, you may quickly import and produce more learning material than you can effectively process. To make sure that you can swiftly handle the overload, SuperMemo uses the priority queue.

Using Alt+P (Learning : Priority : Modify on the element menu), you can set each element's priority from 0% to 100%. Note that 0% corresponds with high priority!

By default, the outstanding repetitions will be auto-sorted from high to low priority. This way, if you fail to complete your daily load of learning, it will only be the lower priority material that will suffer. Also by default, at the beginning of your working day (i.e. at your first run of SuperMemo), your outstanding material from previous days will be be auto-postponed (again with high-priority material being least affected).

Read an article about the priority queue to learn more about:

manual sorting of elements,
defining sorting criteria,
turning off auto-sort and auto-postpone, and more.

For more options for handling the overload, see:

the postpone dialog to postpone portions of the learning material and to define the postpone criteria
Mercy: to spread the excess of the learning material over a period of time (or to advance the material before a vacation, etc.)
to learn more about different options, see also: Postpone, Advance and Mercy

Other basic skills

Evolution of knowledge in incremental reading

3 main principles will underlie the evolution of knowledge in SuperMemo:

decrease in complexity - articles will be converted into sets of paragraphs. Paragraphs will be dismantled into sets of independent sentences and statements. Sentences will be shortened to maximize the information-vs-wording ratio, etc.
active recall - all pieces of information will ultimately be converted into active recall material such as question-answer pairs, cloze deletions, picture recognition tests, sound recognition tests, etc. This is to maximize your recall of knowledge
incrementalism - all changes will take place gradually in proportion to available time, with respect to your selected material's priority, and in line with the gradually increasing strength of memory traces. Incremental nature of learning in SuperMemo will help you get the maximum memory effect in minimum time. See: The value of interruption in learning

Using pictures

For additional information, mnemonic cues, and a sheer fun of learning, an article that you read incrementally in SuperMemo can be illustrated with meaningful pictures taken from its contents, or from other sources. Press Ctrl+F8 to choose one of the pictures embedded in the article.

If you happen to import from Wikipedia, SuperMemo 16 makes it possible to download full resolution images instead of just thumbs. Check images marked with THUMB!!! and click Download.

Figure: After importing a Wikipedia article on atherosclerosis, two thumbs have been selected and downloaded in full resolution (one shown in the picture). Insert will insert the picture to illustrate the article and all its extracts and clozes. The remaining thumbs will be available for download in all portion of text that refer to their corresponding images.

For more, see: Visual learning

Topics vs. Items

In SuperMemo you see pieces of information presented to you in 2 basic forms:

topics: these are usually longer articles that you want to read
items: these are usually specific questions that you will need to answer

Topics and items are presented in a different manner and at different times. Topics keep the knowledge you want to learn (i.e. things you want to read about), while items keep the knowledge that you want to remember (i.e. the knowledge you already posses, but might forget).

Topics

A topic in SuperMemo is an article, its part, or a sentence that you want to learn. Topics can also have a form of a picture, a video, a piece of music, etc. Unlike items, topics do not test your knowledge. They are used in passive reading, watching, or listening only. Short text topics are used to generate cloze deletions. Topics take part in the incremental learning process. Once they are converted to items, they are often dismissed (i.e. ignored in learning) or done (i.e. deleted from the learning process altogether). Both Done! and Dismiss must be executed by the user (i.e. they are not automatic).

Using topics

Topics are marked in Contents with a green T icon (). Topics may be very long (entire articles) or very short (single sentences). This is how you work with topics:

read the topic from the top
if you find some interesting information, extract it (e.g. with Alt+X); the extract will form a new independent topic; the new topic will be shorter and will be handled in the same way as all other topics
decide how far you want to go into reading the topic depending on its priority and available time (e.g. interrupt fast, if you are in a hurry, or read it all, if the topic is of top importance)
if you finish reading the topic, execute Done! (e.g. Ctrl+Shift+Enter); this will delete the topic without deleting the material that it produced
only if the topic is as short as a single sentence, create cloze deletions (e.g. with Alt+Z)
return to reading the topic next time it comes for review

On longer topics you read and extract, on very short topics you generate cloze deletions.

Items

Item in SuperMemo is a piece of knowledge that you want to remember. It usually has a question&answer form. The main difference between an item and a topic is that an item actively tests your memory (e.g. with a question), while a topic is used for passive review only (e.g. for reading, viewing, watching, etc.).

Tasks

In addition to items and topics, you can also use tasks in incremental learning. Tasks are jobs sorted by Value/Time or Value/Price ratio.

For an extensive comparison of items, topics and tasks in SuperMemo see: Element types in SuperMemo.

Reading overload

Overload occurs when the student has more outstanding items or topics to review than (s)he can handle. Few users can sustain more than 200 item repetitions per day. When the Outstanding parameter in the Statistics window starts going above that number, overload is likely.

Overload can best be handled with Auto-postpone. However, a one-time big load can be resolved efficiently with Postpone (delaying all elements), or Mercy (spreading all review in time).

You can also postpone a specific topic with all its extracts using the following method:

Go to the topic in question
Press Ctrl+Space to open the topic, its extracts, and clozes in the browser
Choose Process browser> : Postpone on the browser menu

Note that you may need to use Learning : Locate extracts on the element menu if you have moved portions of your learning material to other branches.

Auto-sort and auto-postpone

As long as you prioritize your learning material well, you should make your life easier by checking the following 2 options:

Learn : Sorting : Auto-sort repetitions that results in sorting your outstanding queue by priority at the start of each day.
Learn : Postpone : Auto-postpone that results in postponing outstanding repetitions of lower priority at that start of each day. It ensures you do not get overloaded,

and it ensures that you minimize delays for top priority material.

Auto-postpone always leaves a number of top-priority elements in the queue. The purpose of the postpone is to get rid of the main mass of low-priority material and focus on top-priority material. You are most likely to use Postpone after a day of learning, while Auto-postpone is executed before your learning day begins. This is why it never affects today's material, and does not postpone top-priority material from previous days. If you have Auto-postpone checked on the menu, you will always start the day with all the repetitions scheduled for that day, and a number of unexecuted top-priority repetitions from previous days. Even though Auto-postpone increases the intervals and reduces the retention of low-priority material, it also makes you benefit from the spacing effect. Research shows that longer intervals may paradoxically increase the speed of learning (up to a certain point). This comes from the fact that the default retention in SuperMemo (around 95%) is higher than the retention that delivers the largest number of items remembered per unit of time invested.

You can start with default settings of the sorting criteria, however, if you feel you make insufficient progress with items (e.g. high forgetting index), you can reduce the proportion of topics. If the inflow of new material is too slow, you can increase the proportion of topics. If your priorities are imperfect, increase the degree of randomization. If you think you miss too many high priority items (see: Tools : Statistics : Analysis : Use : Priority protection from the main menu), reduce the randomization. By trial and error, you will arrive at your optimum. Even after you find your optimum, keep experimenting with different randomization and topic levels. This will help you avoid various cognitive biases that develop through the routine of learning. It may also be helpful to execute random review from time to time (just to get a general feel of your overall progress).

With Auto-sort and Auto-postpone, you will nearly never have to worry about material overload. Each time you start SuperMemo for the first time on a given day, it will first postpone repetitions that you failed to execute on previous days. It will use default postpone criteria which you can always modify (e.g. with Learn : Postpone : All elements). After postponing the backlog of repetitions, SuperMemo will sort today's repetitions and those that were left outstanding by Auto-postpone. Auto-sort will use sorting criteria specified earlier with Learn : Sorting : Sorting criteria.

With Auto-postpone and Auto-sort, you can always begin your day with a manageable portion of material sorted by priority. Your learning sequence will be optimized with no action on your part (i.e. no options to choose, and no keys to press).

Overload hints

With or without Auto-postpone, your only sure remedy against forgetting is always the same: complete your repetitions!
Auto-postpone affects all days except for today. If you have low-priority topics scheduled for today, Auto-postpone will delay them only tomorrow and only if you do not review them today. This is to ensure that low-priority topics also have a chance to enter repetitions as determined by your Randomization/Prioritization balance in the sorting criteria
In the Postpone dialog, Skip the following number of top priority elements skips only elements that were skipped by Skip conditions on the Parameters tab. It will not protect elements from being postponed if they are not protected by the postpone criteria. Whatever the value of this parameter, you can still have all your elements postponed. You can best view it as a pro-postpone parameter that is used to force extra postpones (not an anti-postpone parameter that protects your from extra postpones). Skip here means "skip postpone protections" not "skip postpones"
Simulate in Postpone can be used to tell you how well your current postpone criteria work. It ignores Skip the following number of top priority elements because this parameter needs no simulation (it will always enforce skipping the said number of elements protected from Postpone by the postpone criteria)

Subset review

Subset review is a review of a portion of the learning material (e.g. before an exam). The portion may be identified with search, by branch selection in Contents, by category, and other means that determine a subset of elements. The reviewed subset material may be sorted by its sequence in the knowledge tree (Contents), priority, difficulty, interval, retention, recency, etc.

Review types

Search and review

Search and review in SuperMemo is a review of a subset of elements that contain a given search phrase. For example, before an exam in microbiology, a student may wish to review all his knowledge of viruses using the following method:

search for all elements containing the phrase virus (e.g. with Ctrl+F)
review all those elements (e.g. with Ctrl+Shift+L)

The review may include all subset elements (e.g. Learning : Review all in the browser with Ctrl+Shift+L), or only the elements that are outstanding for review on that particular day (e.g. Learning : Learn in the browser with Ctrl+L). Before you execute the review, you can randomize the review material (Ctrl+Shift+F11), sort it by priority, by recency, by interval, by size, by age (in the learning process), etc. You can also apply your default sorting criteria with Ctrl+S in the browser. All forms of review run on all elements except for (1) dismissed elements and (2) those elements that have already been processed on this particular day. The latter condition makes sure that you can do a comprehensive review in various subsets without duplicating your work on a given day. You can overcome the block of double review on a given day by using Add all to outstanding (see below).

If you build an extensive collection of things worth learning, subset review may help you learn about Subject A, and do a value-rich review of your material across many others domains at the same time! You kill many birds with one stone.

Search : Find elements makes it possible to define OR-searches and to save search definitions. This way you can, for example, choose a set of terms that define your "diabetes" subset and use them each time you want to review your "diabetes" material.

The parameter Subset in the Statistics window indicates the progress of repetitions in subset learning. This field displays the number of items, the number of topics, and the number of pending elements in subset learning. The name in the parentheses describes the currently processed subset.

Branch review

In the simplest case of branch review, the button Learn at the bottom of the contents window can be used to execute outstanding repetitions on a selected branch of the knowledge tree. For example, to make repetitions in the Medical Sciences branch, click that branch and then click Learn. Using Learn in the contents window is like using Learn in the element window, except only elements belonging to the selected branch will be considered in making repetitions.

To thoroughly review a branch of knowledge (including non-outstanding elements), do the following:

Select the branch in Contents
Choose Learning : Review all on the Process branch> menu (Ctrl+Shift+L)

Random review

To randomly review a branch or a subset:

open the branch or subset in the browser
randomize the content of the browser (Ctrl+Shift+F11)
execute a review (e.g. Learning : Review all on the browser processing menu)

Review modes

In a browser subset, in a contents branch, or in the entire collection, there are 3 main ways of executing subset review:

review only the outstanding material: Learn (Ctrl+L) will execute only the outstanding repetitions, i.e. the elements that have been scheduled for review today or before today
review all the material: Review all (Shift+Ctrl+L) will execute all outstanding repetitions as well as force mid-interval repetitions on all elements in a subset (except those elements that have already been reviewed today). Review of non-outstanding elements is equivalent to Learning : Execute repetition (Shift+Ctrl+R) available from the element menu
review all topics: Review topics works like Review all but it does not include items, i.e. it forces a review of all topics in a subset (except topics that have already been reviewed today). Each time you do subset review on a set of items, you add some extra time to the total cost of learning of that portion of the material. This is why you may wish to exclude items from a review that occurs often

All the above options are available on Process branch> : Learning submenu of the contents menu, or Process browser> : Learning submenu of the browser menu.

Adding elements to the learning queue

Instead of spending your time on a thorough review of a branch or subset, you may prefer to intersperse the review material in your standard learning process. You can do it with Learning : Add to outstanding.

Add to outstanding is a rationalization upon 2 extremes:

well-timed incremental learning (or classical spaced repetition)
subset review (e.g. before an exam)

On one hand you can proceed with your outstanding queue, on the other, you can smuggle some subset review in between. For example, you might learn about the superiority of "intermittent fasting" over "fasting". You will want to investigate the subject to perhaps employ it in your lifestyle. However, you do not want the subject to be buried in thousands of articles you keep reading. Nor do you want it to monopolize your learning time on a given day. You can import several articles on intermittent fasting and spread them sparsely in your outstanding queue with Add all to outstanding. By the end of the day, you will have a peek at all those articles, have them all well prioritized, and integrated with the learning process (in proportion to the value of the newly discovered content).

An alternative to Add to outstanding is to spread priorities (with Priority : Spread), however, it has 2 flaws:

you will not get the instant gratification from the instant review of a hot topic
you risk that new imports will displace the articles of interest before you manage to give them a preview

In other words, Add to outstanding is a more extreme version of Priority : Spread, but not as radical as Learning : Spread in the browser (irreversible rescheduling), or subset review (reversible review).

Repeating items before topics

If you ever neglect learning, you may wish to unload your item backlog ahead of your topic backlog. You can optimally do it with a change to your sorting criteria. However, you can also start your day from 100% item repetitions:

Choose View : Outstanding
Sort repetitions by type (items first)(e.g. by clicking the header of the Type column), or choose Child : Items
Choose Learn on the browser menu to make repetitions (or Tools : Save repetitions on the same menu to make the sorting permanent)

Ideally, in incremental reading, you should have items and topics mixed up. This will help you achieve balance between retention of the old material and the inflow of the new material. By working with items first, you risk slowing down learning by working on high retention. That's a step back to classical SuperMemo.

Semantic review

If you want to semantically connect a group of elements related to a single subject in incremental reading, you can use subset review based on the elements' tree structure created in the incremental learning process. This way you can quickly review all elements related to a topic whose "big picture" became hazy.

go to any element that makes a part of the knowledge structure related to given problem
use the Reference link button () on the navigation bar to get to the original article
use Contents to find a relevant subbranch (or stay at the root of the article to review it all)
browse the selected branch (e.g. with Ctrl+Space)
choose Learning : Review all (Shift+Ctrl+L) to review all elements in the logical/semantic sequence (the sequence of branches reflects the order of processing of individual paragraphs in the article)

You can also choose Learning : Learn branch on the element menu to begin branch learning for one of the ancestors of the currently displayed element. You can use this method if you encounter interesting material that you would like to refresh more thoroughly before you proceed with your standard learning process.

Advance review

Advance is not a form of review. However, it makes it possible to shorten the intervals and speed up the review. For example, if your exam comes in 100 days, you can shorten all intervals in a subset to less than 100 days with Advance.

The Advance operation will not work on 2 kinds of topics:

those whose interval is shorter than the advance interval
those who have been repeated today (use Learning : Add to outstanding if you need to go around this limitation)

Examples of subset review

Example 1: search and review

If you would like to review the material related to Auguste Comte (1798-1857) do as follows:

Press Ctrl+F and paste Auguste Comte in the search box
Press Enter or click Find (this will search your collection and open a browser with the results)
Choose one of the subset learning options:
- to prevent forgetting: press Ctrl+L or choose Process browser> : Learning : Learn to review only the outstanding material. This will help you review only the items that are most likely to be forgotten and a portion of topics that have been scheduled for review for today
- to learn new things: choose Process browser> : Learning : Review topics to review all topics related to Auguste Comte
- to maximize the review (e.g. before an important deadline): press Shift+Ctrl+L or choose Process browser> : Learning : Review all to review all topics and to force a repetition on all items related to Auguste Comte. Remember that premature review of items may paradoxically slow down your long-term learning

Example 2: branch review

If your history exam is approaching and you cannot cope with all repetitions in the collection, make sure that at least your daily portion of history is thoroughly reviewed:

Select History branch in the contents window
Click Learn at the bottom of the contents window

Repeat the procedure daily. However, in the last 3-5 days, you could follow that yet with Process branch> : Learning : Review all to protectively refresh the material that would optimally be scheduled after the exam.

Important! The frequent use of Review all is not recommended for long-term learning! It departs from the optimum timing for review to consolidate memories. It should only be reserved for situation when burning school situation forces you to neglect your long-term planning.

If you have final drill enabled, remember that subset learning does not keep a separate final drill queue and elements that score less than Good (4) are put to the global final drill queue.

Hints and tips

Importing articles

Importing articles from Wikipedia is easiest:
- to search for Wikipedia articles press Ctrl+F3, type in some keywords, choose Wikipedia, press Enter, and right-click on articles of interest
- to search for an article on a subject you are reading about, select a portion of text and press Ctrl+F3. Choose Wikipedia as described above
- to import Wikipedia articles from Internet Explorer, press Shift+Ctrl+W (Edit : Import web pages : Wikipedia on the main menu)
To quickly import many articles from the web, do the following:
1. find the articles (e.g. with Google),
2. open them in Internet Explorer,
3. in SuperMemo, use Shift+Ctrl+A (Edit : Import web pages : All from the main menu)
To quickly search for articles on the subject you are reading about, select a portion of text, press Ctrl+F3 and choose Google
To type your own notes in SuperMemo use Alt+N (Edit : Add to category : Note on the main menu)
If you would like to store pictures locally on your hard disk (in the image registry), and make them proliferate in incremental reading (e.g. show up in all extracts even if the extracts do not include the picture, etc.), then you must import the pictures to image components using one of the following methods:
- to import pictures included in a single article use Ctrl+F8 (Download images on the component menu), select images and click Insert
- to import pictures from the web, use Copy on the picture in your Internet browser and then press Shift+Ins or Ctrl+V in SuperMemo to paste the picture (if the picture does not paste, press Esc a few times to get to the display mode and try Shift+Ins or Ctrl+V again)
- to import many pictures from many articles in Internet Explorer, use Edit : Import web pages : Pictures) and choose Local images only or Page of images as the import mode
- to optimize the tiling of many pictures after the import, use Components : Tile components on the element menu
- see also: Adding pictures to SuperMemo
Instead of scanning paper books and doing OCR for the sake of incremental reading, always begin with looking for electronic equivalents. In most basic areas of knowledge, there are multiple sources of learning materials available. There are fewer and fewer cases where you need to do any scanning. These days, you can even be finicky and search for HTML texts to replace your nice PDF materials (to avoid the pain of converting PDF to HTML)
Some texts rich in pictures and tables may be handled with difficulty by SuperMemo (the older the SuperMemo, the more difficulty you may experience). It may be very useful to learn to use HTML filters (press F6). Some of the problems stem from bugs in Internet Explorer that SuperMemo employs to display and edit texts formatted in HTML. This particularly refers to older versions of Internet Explorer (e.g. IE 6.0). It is therefore highly recommended you install Internet Explorer 7 or later to make your life easier
If you are pressed by exam deadlines and still not too fluent with incremental reading, it would make more sense to do some of your old and new learning in parallel. For example, 30% incremental reading and 70% traditional learning. You are bound to make many mistakes in strategy and the discovery process may take longer than until the exam. At the beginning you will have a big overhead cost (strategy, material selection, formulation, learning SuperMemo itself, etc.). It would not then be surprising if your performance on the exam actually dropped at your first try! You could pick a couple of chapters that you particularly enjoy and use them in your incremental learning practice. You would then process the rest of the material using your old methods. You cannot possibly embark on a massive conversion of textbooks into SuperMemo material before you get the feel of how to do it right! It can backfire and discourage the use of SuperMemo. As always, proceed carefully and incrementally

Inflow of new articles

SuperMemo uses 2 basic element types: topics (articles) and items (questions and answers). Those are treated differently in the review process. Topics represent what you want to know, while items hold what you know. To better understand the difference, see: Topics vs. Items
Keep your topics/articles in check. Use your sorting criteria to make sure you get a solid dose of daily items/questions in addition to your reading. High topic overload may slow your item flow and damage the active recall process. High topic load will make SuperMemo resemble traditional reading where your retention is unacceptably low. You can decide your optimum ratio on the basis of time needed for repetitions. For example, 5:1 item:topic ratio would probably still make you spend more time on reading than on reviewing. Increase that ratio to increase your retention, reduce the ratio temporarily if you need to do a great deal of reading. If you are not sure, set items:topics to anywhere between 3:1 and 8:1. Still too hard to decide? Review 5 items for each topic in the outstanding queue.
Tools : Statistics : Statistics : Protection can be used to inspect your progress in processing top priority material on a given day
Tools : Statistics : Analysis : Use : Protection can be used to inspect the degree of processing of your top priority material over time

Reading

While reading, you can display the Read toolbar on the learnbar by clicking the Reading options button (SuperMemo: The Reading options button displays the Read toolbar in the learnbar at the bottom of the element window). You can also choose Window : Toolbars : Read to place the toolbar in a convenient place on the screen and press Shift+Ctrl+F5 to save the current layout of windows as the default one. The toolbar may be helpful before you learn to use the keyboard to access all its functions
If you do not like the large spacing between the lines when you press Enter, use Shift+Enter. Remember this trick! Many users struggle for months with line spacing only to discover this precious tip. This tricky behavior is by Internet Explorer, not by SuperMemo
Once you finish processing the article, use Done! () on the learnbar or Done from the element menu (e.g. with Ctrl+Shift+Enter followed by all necessary confirmations with Enter). This will clean up your learning process without affecting the work you have done (all extracts and clozes will remain in the learning process). Done! deletes (1) the article, (2) its repetition history, (3) its components, etc. However, it leaves the original empty element as a source of reference and as a holder for the derived structure of extracts and cloze deletions. Done! is executed at the moment when you believe you have completed reading and processing a given piece of text. This usually means skipping all unimportant parts and extracting all important parts of the article. You repeat Done! on all topic extracts generated from the article. You will quickly discover that keeping the original articles for reference only clutters your collection, increases its size and produces an excess of search hits. Getting rid of the original is usually the preferred action. You can always get to the original article on the net using its reference link
If you return to an interrupted article in the learning process, the cursor in the text is set on the last-processed text. That text selection is called a read-point. When leaving the article, you can also manually set the read-point' at the place where you interrupted reading. Choose Ctrl+F7 to set the read-point, or click the set read-point button () on the Read toolbar
Highlighting texts automatically sets the read-point
Use Clear read-point () on the Read toolbar, or press Ctrl+Shift+F7, to remove the read-point
Enter is the default key used when progressing through the learning cycle. When a read-point is selected and you press Enter, instead of inserting a new line, SuperMemo will automatically begin or resume repetitions. This will also be the case if you make any selections in the text. Enter will play its usual function only if there are no selections in the text. Although using Del and Enter instead of just Enter in these circumstances may seem cumbersome, you will quickly find this behavior indispensable in learning. If you still do not like this Enter behavior despite giving it a try, set Allow Read-Point Enter=0 in supermemo.ini
If you use Delete before cursor, you may be annoyed by lack of Undo. However, if you mistakenly delete important texts (e.g. when using After instead of Before), you can find a temporary backup of the deleted text in collection's \TEMP folder (the file is named Last text portion delete with element number and delete time appended). The backup file is deleted only at Repair collection or at Garbage, i.e. it will not disappear if you quit the element
Horizontal lines can be used to split articles. If you insert a horizontal line and call Split article, the article will be split into separate elements. Split article is also available from the Commander. To insert a horizontal line press Shift+Alt+H or type <hr>, select it, and press Ctrl+Shift+1 (or choose Text : Convert : Parse HTML on the component menu). Parse HTML () is also available on the learnbar
Use Ctrl+] and Ctrl+[ to change the size of the font in the selected text

Generating clozes

In incremental reading, you should always strive at converting passive texts into active questions. Ideally, all passive texts should be deleted when done with. All interference from "outside world" makes SuperMemo less precise. Passive texts provide little extra help in learning. At the same time, they provide interference, and should only be used to generate new clozes (or for reference)
When you press Alt+Z, the currently selected keyword in the current topic is marked as clozed. The newly created item is not visible (i.e. you will not immediately see the answer nor the deletion brackets). You can see the newly created item by pressing Alt+Left arrow. Use that key to edit the newly created cloze (e.g. to add context clues, shorten the text, improve the wording, etc.). However, if possible, you should do such mini-jobs incrementally, i.e. on the next encounter with the clozed item
If you want to cloze more than one keyword, before you apply Cloze, you should make sure that the processed statement or paragraph is as simple as possible. You should try to use only one-sentence extracts to generate cloze deletions! Some newcomers dislike incremental learning at first. Monster cloze deletions are a chief reason for their negative feelings. Simplifying the parent paragraph to a simple statement will produce simple clozes that will require little processing. Using Cloze on complex texts multiplies the cost of re-editing when simplifying texts (in all cases where you cloze more than one keyword). If you use Cloze on a longer multi-sentence paragraph, you will have to put extra effort in simplifying the resulting items. All cloze deletions should be short enough to ensure you read them entirely at repetition time. Otherwise, your brain will tend to "deduce" the answer from non-semantic cues. This will defeat the purpose of learning! By using one-sentence extracts for cloze deletions, you will save ages on repetition time and eons on time needed to simplify clozes and converting them to the final form based on the minimum information principle. If you plan to cloze only a single keyword along the incremental principles, you can afford less pre-cloze simplification/editing, esp. on the material that still needs more work on its "big picture" structure
Your work on extracting fragments, producing cloze deletions and editing them should be incremental. In each review, do only as much work on the learning material as is necessary! Extracting and editing in intervals adds additional benefit to learning and is more time-efficient. Each time you rethink structure and formulation, you hone the representation and "connectivity" of a given piece of knowledge in your memory. In addition, your priorities change as you proceed with learning. At times, you will over-invest in a piece of knowledge that quickly becomes irrelevant or out-dated. The incremental approach will reduce the impact of over-investment. Incrementalism should then be used not only while reading, but also in the follow-up processing and formulation of knowledge. See: Examples. Unless you work with top-priority material, do not generate all your cloze deletions in one go. Make it incremental. Generate a cloze today, and another one at the next review. The incremental nature of the learning process, variegated coloring of texts marked with processing styles, and a complex extract hierarchy seem to quarrel with the perfectionist nature of many. However, the purpose of incremental reading is the maximum effect in minimum time. For that reason, at extract time, you are already forming passive trace memory engrams of the extracted sentence. The optimum strategy then is not to proceed with generating cloze deletions, but to move on to other elements in the queue or to other extracts in the same article (if the high priority of the article justifies it)
Once you finish processing a paragraph with cloze deletions, use Done! () on the learnbar or on the element menu (e.g. with Ctrl+Shift+Enter). This will clean up your learning process without affecting the work you have done. All clozes will remain in the learning process. Done! deletes the extract/paragraph, however, it leaves the original empty element as a holder of the derived cloze deletions. Once you believe your cloze deletions cover all vital keywords of the statement that forms the topic, you execute Done! again. In the end, only cloze items remain in the learning process. Note that the process of descending from the source article to individual clozes may take years. The whole process is incremental and is paced by the declining traces of memory. A single cloze generated from a short sentence often allows of retaining good memory of the entire statement for months. Except for mission-critical pieces of information, you do not execute cloze deletions on all keywords until individual keywords raise questions as to whether they can be recalled individually
Converting to plain text: Plain text takes much less space. Collections rich in plain text are faster to back up. You can convert short pieces of HTML to plain text as long as they do not contain formatting information that may be needed to effectively remember the text. In the long run, simple plain text items might do their work better by depriving you of additional cues carried by the formatting. Leave some of your items as HTML and convert some to plain text. After some time you will probably have your own preferences as to which do their work better
After generating a cloze, the last character remains selected. On one hand it indicates which keyword has just been processed, on the other, selections make it possible to use Enter to move to the next element in repetitions
If you keep getting questions about the template to use at cloze, use Search : Categories to inspect the category to which you imported the article and uncheck Auto-Apply
You can change the appearance of extracts and cloze deletions with stylesheets. See: Changing the appearance of cloze keywords

Changing the appearance of cloze keywords

This is how you can modify the default cloze style in SuperMemo:

From the main menu, select Tools : Options
In the Options dialog box, click the Fonts tab
On the Fonts tab, click the Stylesheet button
In the SuperMemo Stylesheet dialog box, select the Clozed option in the drop list at the top; then use Font, Color, and Background buttons to set individual properties of that style

Removing cloze keyword formatting

Display the HTML code behind a given cloze text (e.g. with Ctrl+Shift+F6). In the HTML code, replace class=clozed with an empty string.

	Before	After
HTML	This is my example <SPAN class=clozed>element</SPAN>	This is my example <SPAN>element</SPAN>
WYSIWYG	This is my example element	This is my example element

Your cloze keywords will be formatted in the same way as the surrounding text.

Mimic real life situations to combat memory interference

Some texts present knowledge in the form that is difficult to remember. Lists and sets are a good example of knowledge that does not stick to memory. Even if you perfectly know the map of Africa, answering the request: "List all countries of Africa" may be pretty hard. There are proven techniques that will help you tackle repetitive, list-rich, or boring knowledge with SuperMemo. All solutions are costly at memorization stage, but will pay handsomely in the long run due to lesser forgetting rate. The basic 2 principles are:

gradually glue individual pieces to your overall knowledge structure
be as visual and mnemonic as possible

Here are some specific hints:

use a mind map: search the net for a nice mnemonic picture of the subject studied (e.g. political map of Africa). The picture will provide the basic skeleton for your memory. Like ornaments on a Christmas tree, you will hang new pieces of knowledge on this mnemonic skeleton. Use the picture to illustrate all topics and items in the studied category.
do not learn it all at once: Add individual items gradually at a point when they acquire some special meaning. Add them when they fit snugly with the rest of your knowledge. Add them when you specifically need them or when you learn about a related subject. If you need enumerative knowledge for an exam, cram it using traditional methods, and still continue adding individual pieces in unique contexts later on when you feel they are interesting or important.
associate with stories: if you ask an expert in the field, you will probably hear that (s)he mastered enumerative knowledge by association with individual case stories. Whatever he or she learned at school was quickly forgotten, but individual cases or problems to solve leave a good and durable imprint due to their uniqueness. Once you hit upon a story that is relevant to your hard-to-remember items, try to learn those items in the context of that particular story (e.g. hang the Cameroon up on your knowledge tree only when reading about Eto's move to Chelsea). If you encounter cases in the course of your practise, describe them shortly and use them to supply context.
supplement with incremental reading: instead of formulating all items along the same repetitive and monotonous template, try to use incremental reading to generate cloze deletions that work on separate storylines. Ideally, you would review your topic and generate just a single subtopic (e.g. on a single country in Africa). Always choose the one that seems most obvious or most important to remember. Always try to add some supplementary material. Be sure you do not provide clues that will make you answer correctly without forming an appropriate association
compare with experts: ask an expert in the field how (s)he remembers a given fact or association. In some cases you may be dismayed to see how poorly experts recall compulsory college material. At other times, you will see how their memory tackles the problem with ease by using a simple mnemonic. This will help you emulate real life learning at a compressed timescale without ever wasting time on trying to master what others never manage to master anyway. That's the basic difference between school learning and your efficient incremental learning: you do not cram it dry along a rigid prescription. You use your creativity to incrementally build a durable structure of useful knowledge!

Example: dealing with enumerations

If you happen to learn the geological periods, you are bound to generate nasty leeches, esp. if you are new to the subject. Using the top-down learning rule, be sure you know the eras, before you learn the periods, and before you move on to the epochs, and further down the tree of knowledge.

A typical mistake would be to start from cramming the meaningless sequence of periods. For example, clozing the Paleozoic Era sequence: "Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous, Permian" could result in a question that is bound to cause problems: "Cambrian, Ordovician, [...], Devonian, Carboniferous, Permian". This cloze will trouble anyone who is not privy to the field. In other words, only those who come with the knowledge ready in their mind will be able to tackle this type of question at little cost! Conclusion: there is no point in learning lists the hard way unless you already know what you are trying to learn! Catch 22!

Instead of using the above approach, it would make far more sense to first anchor the Silurian period in your mind with some meaningful event. For example, the appearance of the bony fish. This way, we might start with a cloze based on "The bony fish appeared in Silurian (443-419 mn years ago)". The following question will be far easier to remember: "The bony fish appeared in [...](period)(443-419 mn years ago)". Even if the answer is the same as in the original unfortunate cloze, that question is not semantically equivalent. You will need more cloze deletions. However, working with similar sequences should always proceed incrementally and in proportion to anchoring individual periods in memory. Later on you can move on to clozing dates, epochs, and other details. All the time you should try to add new interesting anchors and work with the material in parallel to the inflow of meaningful information that is likely to stay long in memory.

Learning

Use Ctrl+W (Tools : Workload from the main menu) to view the calendar of repetitions. Double-click a day to see which elements will be reviewed on that day. You can also inspect which elements had been reviewed on individual days in the past (switch from Workload to Repetitions mode)
To inspect the number of today's outstanding elements, peek at the status bar which can be saved at the bottom of the screen in the default layout. You can also look at the Statistics window (e.g. with F5). The Statistics window can also be saved in the default layout (with Ctrl+Shift+F5)
The optimum time allocation for reading (topics) and learning (items) depends on a number of factors: the subject and the importance of articles, their difficulty, fun factor, your interests, your preferences, your knowledge, your mood, your circadian cycle, etc. The optimum allocation of time can vary from seconds to hours! This is one of the factors where the power of incremental reading comes from. For some texts, you may find it difficult to reach reasonable attention levels for longer than a few minutes. Often you can retain your maximum processing power for just a single sentence or paragraph. On other texts that are highly interesting, well written, highly useful, or highly important, your curiosity and rage to master may kick in and let you go on for several hours without a break. In incremental reading, the primary criterion for time allocation is your level of concentration. You can literally lick a hundred articles in a continuous block of time and still keep your mind highly focused and alert. Some articles will be processed in depth, others will be quickly postponed. The concentration criterion is all-inclusive. It includes all factors listed above: difficulty of an article may affect your concentration, your tiredness will always reduce optimum allocations for difficult texts and increase allocations for interesting or enjoyable texts (those who help you "survive" a bad learning day)
You can leave some low-priority material in the passive form (i.e. without generating cloze deletions). Naturally, this material will gradually become difficult to recall or entirely forgotten. The best moment for using Remember cloze is when you notice that the material becomes volatile. Do not convert the entire passage into clozes at once (unless it is very important). Pick the most important keyword and create just a single cloze deletion. When the next review of the passage comes along, you will be able to determine which other keywords must be used with cloze deletion to prevent forgetting the key information. It is very difficult to predict how many clozes you will need to generate to attain perfect recall of the whole passage. On occasion, a single cloze suffices. At other times, a single passage can require a dozen of clozes!
The better you get, the more often you will want to resort to incremental learning. The stronger your incremental learning skills, the shorter the working period that makes employing incremental learning effective. For a proficient user, even a next day's assignment might make sense to be done with incremental learning tools. For a beginner though, it is enough to consider that it may take you a few months of practise to truly understand the flow of knowledge in incremental reading (and in your memory). This alone might make it ineffective in learning for a test that comes in a month or two
Auto-postpone brings you closer to the ideal spaced repetition learning by reducing the load of low priority material that you cannot possibly master due to excess volume. In a sense, auto-postpone separates high priority material (spaced repetition) and low priority material (traditional learning). Without it, you are stuck in the middle of those two extremes
You can increase the randomization of your material by adding to Randomization degree in sorting criteria (Learn : Sorting : Sorting criteria from the main menu). Randomization can be set separately for topics and items. It should help you avoid tunnel vision and the priority bias
You can shorten or increase the interval for individual elements. If you want to schedule a given article for review on a selected day, choose Learning : Reschedule on the element menu (e.g. by pressing Ctrl+J). You can also use Learning : Execute repetition (e.g. by pressing Ctrl+Shift+R). Execute repetition works like Reschedule with this difference that a repetition will be executed before rescheduling. Choose between the two depending on whether you have seen the contents of the item and have attempted to recall it from memory. Execute repetition requires providing a grade (unless you execute it on day when a repetition has already been done).
For items of lesser importance, reduce priority (Alt+P), increase the interval (Ctrl+Shift+R), or even increase the forgetting index. Forgetting index can be used to optimize the trade-off between the knowledge acquisition rate and knowledge retention. Giving items low priority in an overloaded collection is similar to giving it a higher forgetting index.
The degree of damage incurred by material overload can be seen in Tools : Statistics : Analysis : Use : Priority protection. On one hand you want to increase the value of Priority protection. On the other, limiting the speed of importing new articles in proportion to the progress of learning might make your collection "get stale" resulting in less fun in learning and lesser motivation. Some older articles may be pushed away to lower priorities by overload only to be deleted later as not important enough, not good enough, or outdated
You should never stop thinking about the value of items that you keep in your memory. See: Re-evaluation of items
Use Spread in the browser to change the distribution of your learning material in time. You can speed up learning before an exam by compressing your learning schedule in a selected period. You can also redistribute the material in a longer period after a boring exam (for incremental review, re-learning, deprioritization, and/or elimination). For that latter job, you can choose a specific portion of the material to be served per day. Read about Mercy
Derivation steps in reasoning/mathematics. If you are learning mathematics, you might wonder if you should commit individual derivation steps of a mathematic proof or solution, or should you just focus on the final outcome. The choice will depend on your goals. If you only need the final formula, time spent on learning the derivation steps could be better spent learning other important portions of the material. If you are not sure today what you will need in the future, you could just type in the whole derivation into a single topic and memorize the final formula. Later, in incremental reading, you will make incremental decisions whether portions of the derivation are or are not important in your work or further learning. This piece of knowledge will compete with others in the learning process and in the long term you may ultimately decide if you want to memorize the details, keep them for passive review only, dismiss/delete some of the steps, or dismiss the entire derivation as redundant (or too costly to learn). Naturally, derivation will often enhance your ability to efficiently use the formula. Hence the decision is never easy. Once you have derivation steps committed, you can always play with their priority to determine the probability you will review them well enough to make a difference to your knowledge.
You can separate reading (topic) from review (items). However, variety is a spice of life. A random mix of reading and repetitions is a very powerful tool in overcoming the monotony of the earlier versions of SuperMemo. Interspersing topics with items provides for many of the advantages of incremental reading as opposed to traditional learning or classical SuperMemo. To review topics only (reading) choose (1) View : Outstanding, (2) Child : Topics and then (3) Process browser> : Learning : Learn (Ctrl+L). To make repetitions only (items), use an analogous method. It might be a better strategy to mix topics and items during the reading phase, and consolidate knowledge by making item-only repetitions later in the day. In the end, sticking to priorities, auto-sort, and auto-postpone will be the best least-biased long-term strategy
Fun is the key to success: If your learning text is too "dry", not too meaningful, too wordy, etc. the fun of learning will drop. If learning is not enjoyable, it is less likely to be effective. If you dislike a specific article, perhaps a Wikipedia replacement would be fun and more meaningful? Even if this is a bit longer, you can process it pretty fast with incremental reading, illustrate with pictures, and enjoy the process
Nurse your hunger for knowledge: You have to find the clear-cut link between knowledge and the value it brings to life. The hunger for knowledge grows as you get more educated (the more you know the more you know you don't know). So there is an excellent remedy for poor motivation: learn more and see how it can impact your and others' life
You determine the speed of learning in incremental reading! You can determine the frequency of presentation of topics (e.g. using A-Factors, priorities, Mercy, etc.). You can determine the level of retention for items (e.g. with the forgetting index, priorities, auto-postpone, etc.). You can execute forced ahead-of-time review of any material (see: Subset review)
You MUST NOT memorize material that you do not understand! There is some hope that by doing more learning in other areas you will at some point understand. It is far more likely though that you will build up frustration with items that mean little. If you do not understand a term or concept, you need to dig deep into why. Is it terminology? This can be easily investigated and fixed. Or is it a problem with the material itself? Perhaps you can find an alternative on the net? Perhaps you can find a nice picture on the net to illustrate the item? Obviously, each little investigation takes time, but it is better to master 10-20% of the material well, that to cram an encyclopedia without comprehension. Even if you fail an exam, those 10% can be useful in the future (e.g. if you retake the exam). In general, schools load more than students can master and this leads to lots of stress and frustration. By choosing SuperMemo, you have already made the first good step. Now you need to make order in the process and think carefully about your best long-term strategy. Comprehension is the key to success!
If you want to grade an item Null or Bad, press 0 or 1 respectively
SuperMemo is not yet equipped with tools to help you efficiently use your knowledge for good causes. It will boost your knowledge but... you must be vigilant: Do not spend your time on gaining knowledge for the knowledge sake! Think applicability! Luckily, as your knowledge grows, so does your ability to use it efficiently

Re-evaluation of items

You should remember that all items introduced into your learning process require endless attention in reference to their applicability, formulation, importance, logic, etc. In a well-planned learning process, it should not be necessary to review items in the periods between individual repetitions. However, when an item comes up for a repetition, you should make a quick and nearly instinctive assessment of the following:

Do I really need this item?
What is the honest priority of this item in the entire spectrum of my (desired) knowledge?
Is this item difficult to remember? If so, why?
Is it factually correct?
Is it as simple and clear as it could be?
Do I really need to know it now?
Do you need supplementary knowledge to understand all ramifications of the item?

Here are some typical actions you will take depending on the answer to the above questions:

edit the item. You will use keys such as Q, A, or E to enter a desired text field and edit it. In more complex items you will use Ctrl+T to circle between components, Alt+click to switch a component between editing and dragging modes, or Ctrl+E to enter the editing mode
de-prioritize the item. For items that are not important enough, or you are not sure are important enough, use Alt+P and reduce their priority. You can also use Ctrl+Shift+Down arrow for minor deprioritizations
reschedule the item. If you know the item well or for some reason want to manually increase (or decrease) the length of the inter-repetition interval, press Ctrl+Shift+R to select the date of the next repetition
dismiss the item. If you are sure you are not likely to need the item in the future, but you would like to keep it in your collection for reference or archival purposes, press Ctrl+D. Dismissed items are removed from the learning process
delete the item. The key Del is very useful in cleaning your collection from garbage that results from your desire to know more than your memory can hold. In editing mode or in spelling items (i.e. at times when Del plays text editing functions), you may need to use Ctrl+Shift+Del instead. Please note that deleting an element in SuperMemo will delete all its children! You may therefore wish to learn to always use safer Done (Ctrl+Shift+Enter) instead
delay or forget the item. If you think the item is too difficult at the moment, you can postpone learning it. For this purpose, choose Ctrl+J to set a new interval or use Forget to transfer the item to the pending queue. This will give you some time to import some supplementary material that will help you understand the item

Formulation

Use minimum information principle which says that simple elements formulated for active recall bring much better learning results than complex elements. This holds true even though one complex element may be equivalent to a large number of simpler elements. See: Minimum information principle.
Some information may be presented as a list. Lists should be avoided. However, some are inevitable (e.g. list of nerves, list of tributaries, list of EU admissions, etc.). If you need to memorize lists, use mnemonic techniques and try to mimic real life situations to combat memory interference. See also: Learning lists
The way you ask the question in SuperMemo may differ from the way your life asks you the same question. In other words, you may store some material in SuperMemo, but a real-life situation will trick you into being unable to recall it. In other words, you need to properly formulate the material to maximize its recall in all potential contexts
Remember about the universality of memorized rules. For example, it is better to learn a universal mathematical formula than just the examples of its use. Examples can be used to emphasize applicability in various contexts
You can use Parse HTML (Ctrl+Shift+1) to convert selected HTML code into formatting (e.g. try inserting <hr> or <br> and parsing it with Parse HTML). You can also use this option to remove formatting (e.g. if you want to get rid of line breaks)
You can edit your more elaborate texts using your favorite HTML editor. You need to associate that editor with the filename extension *.HTM. For example, if you associate Microsoft Expression Web (free) with *.HTM, you can edit your texts by just pressing Ctrl+F9. If you would rather leave your associations unchanged, you can use F9 to view the file in Internet Explorer, and choose File : Edit with Microsoft Expression Web (that menu item is added to Internet Explorer by Expression Web). For more see: Open HTML files in the default HTML editor
Background color styles are used in incremental reading to preserve the original font used in documents. However, for this to work you must uncheck the following option in your Internet Explorer: Tools : Internet options : General : Accessibility : Formatting : Ignore colors specified on webpages

To learn more about efficient formulation read: Effective learning: 20 rules of formulating knowledge

Pictures

Important pictures should be kept in image components (not inside HTML texts). Use Ctrl+V or Shift+Ins to paste a picture from the clipboard. You can paste the picture to a new element or to an image component. Do not paste pictures to HTML. Having pictures pasted into an image component makes it easy to resize, tile, fit, or move the image, as well as to change its attributes such as stretch, transparency, display time (e.g. at answer time only), etc. Pictures pasted or imported to image components are stored in the image registry and can be searched for by their name. They can be reused in many elements. They are automatically used to illustrate all extracts and clozes generated from the article that holds the picture. They cannot be easily lost when editing texts, etc. HTML components can keep remote pictures stored on the web but, naturally, you will lose them once the picture is removed from the remote server
Use Download with Insert or Localize in Download images on the component menu (Ctrl+F8) to transfer remote pictures to your hard disk
Use Rename (member) (Alt+R) to give pictures meaningful names for an easy search in the image registry
To search for a picture, use:
1. Search : Images (to open the image registry), and
2. Ctrl+S to search the registry (same as Search : Find texts on the registry menu)
If you want a picture to be part of the answer (i.e. not visible at question time), mark it with Answer on the image component menu

To learn more about using pictures, see: Visual learning

References

Hover your mouse over the Reference link button () on the navigation bar to quickly see the reference in longer extracts.
Note that all extracts generate elements that are children of the original article. If you have problems with recalling the original context of a fragment, you can always call it back by pressing the Parent button on the navigation bar. You can also use the Reference link button () to get to the source article, or, if you have already reached it, to get to the original article on the web.
You can edit references in the reference area (which is pink by default). You can safely delete reference fields, but you need to decide if that change should be local (for that element only) or global (for all elements using this reference). You will not be able to delete #Article, #Parent or #Category fields because they are added automatically to references (not being a part of reference). You can freely change the text of references. Illegal changes are all changes that do not comply with the reference format, e.g. lines that do not start with reference field tags, or lines that start with unknown reference field tags (e.g. #Country). If you are unsure how this process works, import a single article from Wikipedia to a newly created collection, create some extracts and play with editing to see how references are processed
If you choose an empty selection for the #Date reference, you will mark the text with the current date and time stamp
To see the address under a link, hover over the link with the mouse and see the status bar. If you are in the editing mode, you will need to press Esc to get to the presentation mode for this to work or you can click the link and use Ctrl+K to view, create and/or change the hyperlink
AND-Search in SuperMemo works on texts, not on elements. This means that reference texts do not take part in AND-Search for the main body of text. This may result in false misses. In SuperMemo, texts and individual reference fields are all treated as separate texts and are all searched independently
Converting HTML to plain text does not affect the formatting of references (i.e. plain text entries can have their references formatted by a stylesheet)
Formatting of references can be changed via stylesheets
You can quickly modify (i.e. set, merge, and delete) the references across a number of elements. To do that, open them in the element browser, right-click your mouse and choose:
- Process browser> : Reference : Set reference to set the same reference to a subset of elements,
- Process browser> : Reference : Merge reference to add reference fields to a subset of elements,
- Process browser> : Reference : Delete reference to remove reference fields from all elements in the subset
References no longer clutter your HTML files. In the past, the size of references would often be greater than the length of the text itself
Reference registry keeps only the reference pointers, while their individual text fields are stored in the text registry
References are added to HTML texts at load time, so that you can still have references located at the bottom of your texts as in earlier versions of SuperMemo
Adding an existing reference to an element (e.g. with Reference : Link from the element menu) does not add to the size of the collection

Your own discoveries

In incremental learning, you will quickly discover why some of your own ideas about the learning process might not be optimum. Here are some things that you will discover on your own within the first 2-3 months of intense incremental learning:

recognition is good for your exam, but recall is vital for your professional skills in the long-term
manually organizing the timing of review is not what suits your memory best; it is actually quite the opposite to the idea of SuperMemo, which says that you review the material at moments that help stabilize memories
manually organizing the order of review is not what suits your memory best (even though subset review is a very useful tool in SuperMemo when preparing for an exam)
for beginners, traditional learning might be superior to SuperMemo in a very short-term (perhaps up to 1-2 months) because of the steep learning curve. You need to learn the toolset of incremental reading before you can reap the benefits (unless you employ simple Q&A learning when SuperMemo might be superior even within a week's perspective)
you may reach 95% recall within 1-2 weeks on condition that you do not postpone your review. However, if you dump 1,000 pages of topics into the process at once, you will simply not manage to review all that material as scheduled by SuperMemo, and your retention might hover around 60-80% depending on how much time you invested in making repetitions
once SuperMemo learns a bit about your memory and habits (1-3 weeks), you will oscillate around 95% recall as of the first repetition (if you do not delay, and if you stick to the rules of formulating knowledge)
you will quickly discover that multiple cloze deletions on a single paragraph are not a good idea (e.g. compare the measured forgetting index with items that have the same cloze keywords separated, or just see how thus gained knowledge works in practice)
you can look at learning parameters in SuperMemo to see how different approaches to learning affect your progress

Advantages of incremental reading

Now that you know how it works, you may wish to read more about the advantages of incremental reading in long term use. Those advantages are not instantly visible or obvious. Some will increase with the growth of your collection. Others will increase with the passage of time and strength of your memories. Others will depend strongly on good knowledge selection and honest priorities. For more see: Advantages of incremental reading.

Advanced incremental reading

Even before you get a good feel of incremental reading, it is recommended that you slowly go through Advanced Incremental Reading article that contains a great deal of hints, examples, and strategy suggestions. You will find there a detailed discussion of the advantages of incremental reading, opinions of users of incremental reading, criticism, etc.

Incremental reading: Summary

If you are serious about learning, you must learn incremental reading! Without it, you might be missing the best part of SuperMemo!
Incremental reading makes it possible to read thousands of articles in parallel without getting lost.
Use Extract (Alt+X) and Cloze (Alt+Z) to extract the most valuable pieces of knowledge while reading. Use the keyboard for maximum speed. However, if you are new to SuperMemo, you can also use the learnbar or the Read toolbar buttons for the job.
Standard repetitions and incremental reading should be intermingled. This serves variety and creativity. Auto-sort repetitions will sort your repetitions, introduce a tiny degree of randomness, and ensure a steady, moderate, and prioritized inflow of new articles into the learning process. Read more about the priority queue
You can control the timing and priority of review in incremental reading by modifying intervals (Shift+Ctrl+R or Ctrl+J), priority (Alt+P), and the forgetting index (e.g. Shift+Ctrl+P).
Use read-points (Ctrl+F7), good titles (Alt+T), reference labels (Alt+Q), and manually inserted context clues to minimize context recovery overhead (i.e. the cost of recalling the correct context of individual questions).
Auto-postpone will automatically delay the review of the excess of low-priority material. Use Postpone to manually handle the overload or define the postpone criteria.
Do not forget to review 20 rules of formulating knowledge to make sure you do not waste hours on badly formulated material.

@@ Line 69: / Line 69: @@
 ===== <span id="dedicated_imports">Dedicated imports</span> (Wikipedia, YouTube, and pictures) =====
-The most popular sources of learning materials are [http://en.wikipedia.org Wikipedia] (for [[incremental reading]]) and [http://youtube.com YouTube] (for [[incremental video]]). For those sources, you have separate options available on the import menu (right click on the import button on the [[learnbar]]). You can also use shortcuts ''Ctrl+Shift+W'' ([http://en.wikipedia.org Wikipedia]) and ''Ctrl+Shift+Y'' ([http://youtube.com YouTube]) to import from those two sources. If you choose those options, only articles available from those sources will be displayed on the import list. Additionally, a dedicated filter will best prepare the imported pages for convenient learning.
+The most popular sources of learning materials are [http://en.wikipedia.org Wikipedia] (for [[incremental reading]]) and [http://youtube.com YouTube] (for [[incremental video]]). For those sources, you have separate options available on the import menu (right click on the [http://help.supermemo.org/wiki/Learnbar#Paste_an_article '''Paste an article'''] button on the [[learnbar]]). You can also use shortcuts ''Ctrl+Shift+W'' ([http://en.wikipedia.org Wikipedia]) and ''Ctrl+Shift+Y'' ([http://youtube.com YouTube]) to import from those two sources. If you choose those options, only articles available from those sources will be displayed on the import list. Additionally, a dedicated filter will best prepare the imported pages for convenient learning.
 <div class="center">
@@ Line 76: / Line 76: @@
 </div>
-If you want to import pictures, you can also use a picture filter that will ignore all non-picture pages opened in Internet Explorer. Use '''Pictures''' on the import button menu on the [[learnbar]] (right click). You can also click '''Filter : Pictures''' in the [[Web import|web import dialog]] when importing pages (e.g. with ''Ctrl+Shift+A'').
+If you want to import pictures, you can also use a picture filter that will ignore all non-picture pages opened in Internet Explorer. Use '''Import pictures''' on the [http://help.supermemo.org/wiki/Learnbar#Paste_an_article '''Paste an article'''] button menu on the [[learnbar]] (right click). You can also click '''Filter : Pictures''' in the [[Web import|web import dialog]] when importing pages (e.g. with ''Ctrl+Shift+A'').
 For more details see: [[Web import]]