on 10-Jun-2019 (Mon)

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

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

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