Incremental reading

Incremental reading is a technique for reading articles and learning/retaining information.

Incremental reading seems to combine several techniques into a package:

• It uses the regular spaced repetition suite of techniques (spaced repetition, active recall, especially cloze deletions)
• It mixes learning of new material with review of old material (in particular, one encounters completely new material during incremental reading, unlike a regular spaced repetition flashcard program where each card must be created individually). In other words, the temporal pacing controls both the pacing of new material and of the review.
• Probably some sort of interleaving where learning/review of different subjects are combined in a single session.
• Possibly some sort of prioritization process that controls the temporal pacing between subjects.

Requirements

• Some sort of spaced repetition software

Training

Scope for improvement

Basically: how big is the difference between the gains a novice can expect, versus the gains a master of this technique can expect?

Software

SuperMemo seems to have the most complete implementation of incremental reading, but there is a plugin for Anki that implements some of the features of incremental reading.

External links

• SuperMemo help page for incremental reading
• "Michael Nielsen re-discovers incremental reading with Anki" by Piotr Wozniak
• Incremental reading FAQ
• Incremental reading (Wikipedia)
• http://supermemo.guru/wiki/Minimum_definition_of_incremental_reading