Incremental Writing (IW) is a method for boosting creativity, quality and pleasure of writing. It synergizes with the natural ability of your brain to update knowledge and organize it into concept networks.
Incremental writing is an extension of incremental reading. You should be familiar with it before considering incremental writing.
Incremental writing is typically assisted by software to maximize the usage of your time by interspacing:
- Reviewing new learning material to develop new insights,
- Reviewing previously acquired knowledge to preserve it over time (forever!),
- Creative work (writing, problem solving, etc).
In IW, the decision of whether you should continue working on a particular text depends on your desire to do so. That desire is a compound of variables: pleasure of writing, state of flow, level of understanding of the topic, etc.
graph TB
step1{{"New article (next repetition)"}}:::state
subgraph IR[" "]
IR-step1["Do Incremental Reading"]:::type
IR-step2>"Read article"]
IR-step3("<img src='/supermemo/incremental-reading/ir-1st-rep-step-1.png'; width='250px' height='154px'/>")
IR-step4["Acquire knowledge"]
end
subgraph IW[" "]
IW-step1["Do Incremental Writing"]:::type
IW-step2-a["Update content using new knowledge"]
IW-step2-b["Add new content"]
IW-step3["Consolidate knowledge"]
end
step1 -. If writing article -..-> IW-step1
IW-step1 -- 1.a. Read and locate mistakes --> IW-step2-a
IW-step1 -- 1.b. New ideas --> IW-step2-b
IW-step2-a & IW-step2-b --> IW-step3
IW-step3 -- 2. Repeat until bored --> IW-step1
IW-step3 -. 3. When bored with current article .-> step1
step1 -. If learning article -.-> IR-step1
IR-step1 --> IR-step2
IR-step2 -- 1. Locate interesting information --> IR-step3
IR-step3 -- 2. Extract valuable text for later --> IR-step4
IR-step4 -- 3. Repeat until bored with current article --> IR-step2
IR-step4 -. 4. When bored with current article .-> step1
classDef state fill:#F3FFDA,stroke-width:2px
classDef type fill:#72F87C,color:#333
A typical incremental writer:
- Never gets bored (there are always new and varied ideas to keep things exciting),
- Increases his creativity (new information is constantly flowing),
- Writes more efficiently (by progressing on several sections in parallel),
- Is less prone to error (dividing in smaller sections makes it easier to spot mistakes, and update erroneous or outdated information with new understandings).