Incremental Reading (IR) is a technique for organizing learning in a way that encourages variety of studying material and iterative problem solving. By contrast, traditional reading involves a linear process of reading a single topic for extended periods of time.
In the context of this wiki, material designates any sort of media through which learning can be achieved. Some example of material include: books, web articles, videos, podcasts, etc.
With spaced repetition and knowledge destructuring, IR is one of the three fundamental paradigms of SuperMemo.
This table compares the principles of incremental reading (parallel) and traditional reading (linear), based on their average implementation and usage. This is not representative of all the variations in which both of these methods can be executed.
|
|
Incremental Reading |
Traditional Reading |
|
Mindset |
Read material until concentration or pleasure dwindles. |
Read material for as long as possible. |
|
Variety of material |
Many (up to hundreds). |
Few (less than a dozen). |
|
Avg. Duration* |
Seconds to minutes for each material. |
Hours for each material. |
|
Min/Max Duration |
Seconds to hours for each material. |
Minutes to hours for each material. |
|
Thinking process |
Incremental: knowledge is gradually revisited multiple times. |
Linear: knowledge is processed only once or twice. |
*: In IR, most material is gradually broken down into smaller chunks, hence the low average duration.
Nothing precludes an incremental reader from deliberately studying a single topic or material for hours at a time. Typical motivations include:
- Studying for school,
- Acumen for a subject matter.
In Incremental Reading, all the material yet to be processed is added into a queue. Each element in the queue is examined in succession.
How long to study each element before moving on to the next one is left at the discretion of the user’s own heuristics. Typical triggers for making that decision include decreases in concentration or pleasure.
This example illustrates the evolution of a paragraph taken from the wiki article about Learning. The actual order of reviews and formulation of items might differ from person to person.
The numbers assigned to each day are only meant as an illustration for the purpose of our example. Actual intervals between repetitions will typically be larger within SuperMemo.
A more accurate term here would have been stage, but day was used instead for its intuititivity.
🚧 Work in progress.
It was created by Piotr Wozniak in xxxx.
🚧 Work in progress.
🚧 Work in progress.
🚧 Work in progress.
In SuperMemo, After importing an article, it will eventually be shown to you again. You read the article and highlight and extract Alt + X the bits you find important.
Those extracts will then be shown to you later, and you are able to repeat the process, only extracting the most important material from the extract.
Incrementally you will painlessly be boiled down to information-dense sentences, of which you can select the key information you wish to remember and make a cloze deletion Alt + Z.
Your incremental reading will involve a pleasant mix of articles (topics), extracts, and question-and-answers to learn from.
SuperMemo allows you to set priorities for every element, postponing the lesser-important material for as long as it needs to be delayed for. This way you can always be sure you are learning the most important material.
You can edit the proportion of topics vs items that you see. This contributes greatly to the enjoyment. (toolbar -> learn -> sorting -> sorting criteria)
Take care to quickly dismiss sources that are unpleasureable to learn from Ctrl + D.
To import PDFs, you can use SMA with the PDF plugin.
To import EPUB, there are multiple options:
Importing EPUBs is also discussed on this Supermemopedia page.