How to Write Good Prompts

Retrieval practice prompts should be focused. A question or answer involving too much detail will dull your concentration and stimulate incomplete retrievals, leaving some bulbs unlit. Unfocused questions also make it harder to check whether you remembered all parts of the answer and to note places where you differed. It’s usually best to focus on ... See more

We could write a prompt which simply asks: “What do you need to make chicken stock?” But this isn’t precise enough: should we recall the quantities or just the names of the ingredients? How much chicken stock are we making? This isn’t focused enough: because it’s asking for so many details simultaneously, it’s unlikely to sharply activate all the m... See more

But with complex ideas, you may find you need to add integrative prompts after you’ve thoroughly practiced their discrete components. In the case of lists, you can imagine that the system could ask you to fill in more blanks simultaneously as your memory of the individual entries improves. I don’t know of any general memory system which does that, ... See more

To internalize a concept, you need to understand its components and relationships.

Writing good prompts often involves interpretation, a first step to creating understanding beyond what’s explicitly written.

The recipe is quite linear, but more complex procedures may branch, including conditions or special cases which could trigger some alternate path in the flowchart. Such predicate structures are usually worth capturing. If the branching is sufficiently complex, you might consider drawing a flowchart and using that in your prompt.

A wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it, is not a part of the mechanism.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

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

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