The Limitations of Memorizing Lists (Patreon)

Lists have traditionally been one of the scourges of studying. Still, they seem to pervade almost any subject imaginable. It seems to be one of the great ironies of our minds that we are so good at creating categories, yet so bad at retaining the information within.

When I set out to write Cloze Overlapper almost two years ago, it truly was a product of necessity. Nothing in my studies was giving me as much trouble as dealing with all of the inescapable lists, sequences, and enumerations you tend to encounter throughout med school.

It was at that point that I first read Piotr Wozniak's renowned Twenty Rules of Formatting Knowledge. His ideas left a lasting impression on me, changing the way I think of flashcards forever, and eventually leading me to the development of Cloze Overlapper.

When I first started using Cloze Overlapper as part of my pre-release testing, it truly felt like a revolutionary change. For the first time ever I actually felt like it was possible to memorize all of those lists I had trouble with before, and not just cram them for the next exam. I started transforming every list I encountered into overlapping clozes. My conviction even went as far as condensing existing flashcards into new lists in order to save time. In some ways I felt like I had discovered the panacea to studying in med school.

Needless to say, that optimism did not last long.

As I added more and more cards to my collection I soon started accumulating more lapses. List items that I had no trouble with recalling before suddenly felt much more difficult to place correctly. Enumerations that I had sorted myself suddenly made much less sense. I was spending more time on my reviews than I did before. Cloze Overlapper was starting to fail me.

What I had run into were the limitations of a method meant to facilitate memorization rather than learning. By solely depending on the artificial links build up by the overlapping question prompts on my cards, I was doing myself a major disservice. You can not construct a strong memory on shaky grounds, and that is what I was doing with my cards more often than not.

But overlapping clozes were working in some instances, and when they did work they were more effective than any other flashcard design I knew of. What were those factors that determined the long-term success of my approach? I had to find out.

...More on that soon!