How to Write Good Prompts

Retrieval practice prompts should be

tractable

. To avoid interference-driven churn and recurring annoyance in your review sessions, you should strive to write prompts which you can almost always answer correctly. This often means breaking the task down, or adding cues.

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

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.

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

Retrieval practice prompts should produce

consistent

answers, lighting the same bulbs each time you perform the task. Otherwise, you may run afoul of an interference phenomenon called “retrieval-induced forgetting”

This effect has been produced in many experiments but is not yet well understood. For an overview, see Murayama et al, Forgetting as a c... See more

Now, this explanation prompt is a good first try, but it could be more precise. It would be reasonable to answer “Why do we use bones to make chicken stock?” with “Because bones are economical.” You want to write questions which cause you to unambiguously retrieve the information you have in mind. This more precise prompt is better:

Q. How do bones

... See more

In some sense, procedures are lists. So we can start by using the cloze-deletion method we used for the ingredient list:

Q:

1. ???


2. Bring to a simmer on low heat (this will take about an hour). We use low heat to produce a bright, clean flavor: at higher temperatures, the stock will both taste and look duller.


3. Lower heat to maintain a bare simmer for an h

... See more

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

— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

Cues and elaborative encoding

If you find yourself struggling with these prompts, it can be helpful to add a cue, like this:

Q. Typical chicken stock aromatics:

• onion


• carrots


• celery


• garlic


• ??? (herb)

A. Parsley

But make sure the cue doesn’t render the prompt trivial: it’s important that you exert some effort to retrieve the answer from memory. Consider th... See more