Incremental Reading

Incremental reading is a method for learning and retaining information from reading that might otherwise be forgotten. It is particularly targeted to people who are trying to learn a large amount of information at once, particularly if that information is varied.

Incremental reading works by breaking up key points of articles, often dozens or thousands of articles, into flashcards, which are then learned and reviewed over an extended period. Concretely, when reading an article (in a web browser), the reader selects extracts (similar to underlining or highlighting a paper article), which are then converted to question-answer format, often by cloze deletion, and then scheduled for learning and review by the learning software. This flashcard creation process is semi-automated – the reader chooses which material to learn and edits the precise wording of the questions, while the software assists in making the flashcards and does the scheduling.

Incremental reading is based on psychological principles of long-term memory storage and retrieval, in particular the spacing effect.

Information is broken into chunks, and an algorithm (usually computer software) organises the user's reading and calculates the ideal time for the reader to review each chunk. The method itself is often credited to the Polish software developer Piotr Wozniak.

Until recently, Wozniak's SuperMemo was the only implementation of incremental reading (as opposed to simply spaced repetition of questions and cloze deletions etc.). Anki has an 'experimental' plugin.

There is also incremental reading support for the text editors Emacs and Yi.