How to Write Good Prompts

Retrieval practice prompts should be

effortful

. It’s important that the prompt actually involves retrieving the answer from memory. You shouldn’t be able to trivially infer the answer. Cues are helpful, as we’ll discuss later—just don’t “give the answer away.” In fact, effort appears to be an important factor in the effects of retrieval practice.

F... See more

This particular prompt is unlikely to require any extra help, but if you really find yourself struggling, you can add a prompt specifically intended to reinforce the association:

Q. Mnemonic device for carrots in chicken stock?

A. rhymes with “parrots”: picture a flock of parrots flying with carrots in their mouths, dropping them into a pot of stock

Writing good prompts feels surprisingly similar to translating written text. When translating prose into another language, you’re asking: which words, when read, would light a similar set of bulbs in readers’ minds? It’s not a rote operation. If the passage involves allusion, metaphor, or humor, you won’t translate literally. You’ll try to find wor... See more

As a form, recipes already involve a somewhat more explicit knowledge structure than you’d find in ordinary prose.

Relatedly, the appropriate scale of a “focused” prompt depends on the scale of the concepts you’ve internalized. This particular set of aromatics is so deeply familiar as a group that I’d write prompts which treat it as a unit (“Italian aromatics”) instead of memorizing individual ingredients and quantities.

Now, prompts are cheap, but they’re not free. Besides their time cost, they have an emotional cost: no one wants to spend time reviewing a bunch of boring material they already know. So if you’re writing prompts for a subject that’s already quite familiar, you should use fewer prompts—not because it’s always safe to write coarser questions for fami... See more

Stock is made by simmering flavorful ingredients in water. By varying the ingredients, we can produce different types of stock: chicken stock, vegetable stock, mushroom stock, pork stock, and so on. But unlike a typical broth, stock isn’t meant to have a distinctive flavor that can stand on its own. Instead, its job is to provide a versatile founda... See more

Exhaustiveness may seem righteous in a shallow sense, but an obsession with completionism will drain your gumption and waste attention which could be better spent elsewhere.

Q. How long should it take to heat a batch of chicken stock (with 2lbs of bones)?

A. About an hour

This knowledge isn’t essential, but “heads-up!”-type information can be quite useful when learning procedures. If you know this detail, you’ll leave yourself enough time when making stock, you won’t be confused when your pot takes forever to heat up, an... See more

In our stock recipe, the verbs aren’t very important: “bring,” “lower,” “strain.” You’re cooking ingredients in water at various temperatures, so those actions are obvious. But conditions or heuristics describing when to move between verbs are important: first when the water reaches a simmer, then after ninety minutes passes. And while it’s not wor... See more