How to write a flashcard that works

People quit flashcards and conclude they are bad at studying. Usually the deck was just badly written, and every review was harder than it needed to be.

A few rules fix most of it.

One card, one fact

The most common mistake is a card that asks for too much:

Front: Describe the stages of mitosis.

You cannot get that right or wrong. You will half-remember it, judge yourself generously, and move on having learned nothing. Split it:

Front: During which phase of mitosis do chromosomes align at the cell equator? Back: Metaphase.

Now the answer is either right or it is not, and the system knows what to do with that.

The question must have exactly one answer

If a card can be answered several ways, you will grade yourself inconsistently and the scheduling becomes noise. "What is important about the liver?" is not a card. "Which organ converts ammonia into urea?" is.

Do not let the card leak its own answer

Watch for cards that give it away:

Answer length. If the blank is always three words, you start pattern-matching.
Grammar. "An example is a ___" tells you the answer starts with a vowel.
Position. If a fact is always the last item in a list, you learn the position, not the fact.

You are trying to test the fact, not the card.

Write cards you can answer in under ten seconds

If a card takes a minute, it is really several cards. Long cards are also where you start cheating - reading the answer "just to check" before you have actually tried.

Cards you did not write need checking

Imported and shared decks are a huge time saver, and they are also full of somebody else's shortcuts. Cards written by a person who already understood the topic tend to be too terse to be answerable by someone who does not.

When you import a deck, expect to rewrite some of it. In Encodr, editing a shared deck gives you your own copy - the original is left alone, so you can fix cards freely.

The test

Read the front of the card. If you can say the answer out loud, in one short phrase, and know immediately whether you were right - the card works.

If you find yourself thinking "well, sort of" - rewrite it. That card was going to waste your time every few days for months.