Found a good blog post about creating good prompts.
Factual Prompt: What type of chicken parts are used in stock? -> Bones.
Explanation Prompt: Why do we use bones to make chicken stock? -> They’re full of gelatin, which produces a rich texture.
more precise: How do bones produce a chicken stock’s rich texture? -> They’re full of gelatin.Grouping: Chicken stock is made with chicken, water, and what other category of ingredients? -> Aromatics.
Missing Element: Typical chicken stock aromatics:
A: Onion
Tip: keep the list in the same order [visual “shape”].
Most spaced repetition software has a special function which can rapidly generate sets of fill-in-the-blank prompts like this. In the software interfaces, these prompts are often called “cloze deletions.” In each review session, the software will only ask you to fill in one blank. This behavior is important because without it, one variant would “give away” the answer to another.
explaination prompt: Why is carrot a good aromatic for chicken stock? -> A quick answer: carrot provides vegetal sweetness; like salt, this sugar brightens other flavors.
elaborative encoding: Typical chicken stock aromatics:
A. Parsley
bad: gives away too much: Typical chicken stock aromatics:
A. Carrots
elaborative encoding: Typical chicken stock aromatics
A. carrots (rhymes with “parrots”: picture a flock of parrots flying with carrots in their mouths, dropping them into a pot of stock)
prompt to Mnemonic: Mnemonic device for carrots in chicken stock? -> rhymes with “parrots”: picture a flock of parrots flying with carrots in their mouths, dropping them into a pot of stock
Notice how I’ve broken the ingredient list down into many questions here, each focused and precise. I’ve noticed that people often feel a compulsion to economize on the number of prompts they write. Prompts seem to carry a per-unit “price,” so people naturally try to write fewer questions which cover more ground. But that’s counter-productive. Unless you explicitly decide to exclude certain information, the number of “units of raw knowledge” is fixed, a constant of the territory. When you write coarser prompts in smaller quantity, you’re not reducing the amount you have to learn. You’re just making the material harder to review.
write more prompts than feels natural.