8 rules for better flashcards.
A short, practical guide to writing good flashcards for spaced repetition systems like Anki and Repple. Each rule below is illustrated with a worked example.
One concept per card
A flashcard should test exactly one thing. If you have to think about which fact you're being asked to recall, the card is doing too much work.
A reliable test: if the answer bundles independent ideas with commas, semicolons, or "and", split it. Tightly paired facts can share a card; unrelated ones can't.
Keep answers terse
Answers are fragments, not sentences. The question already supplies the context; the answer only needs to add the new information.
Most answers should sit under ten words. Don't restate the question.
Make every card self-contained
You won't review these cards while reading the textbook. You'll see them months later, in isolation, with no surrounding context.
Replace deictic references with concrete subjects. If the claim is an objective fact, drop the source entirely and ask about the world. If the claim is opinion, argument, or prediction, name the person making it.
Be concrete: Give the actual fact
Vague answers feel like answers but teach nothing. "Formula relating conditional probabilities" isn't a formula. It's a meta-description: a label for the answer instead of the answer itself.
When the answer is a formula, a definition, or a number, give the formula, definition, or number. Anything less just points at the answer instead of giving it.
Distill, don't parrot
The textbook chose its phrasing for a different purpose: accuracy in a chapter that builds up the terminology, often with hedges and qualifications. Your card has none of that context.
Cut the hedges and the padding, not the load-bearing terms. The card you can paraphrase aloud is the card you actually understand.
Don't enumerate
Questions like "What are the three X?" are fragile. Forget one item and you can't tell whether you've actually learned the material or just missed an entry. They test no single concept and bundle several into the same review.
Either split into one card per item, or use a cloze with separate blanks so each piece can be tested independently.
Use cloze for facts, not concepts
Cloze deletions fit a narrow case: a single specific fact you want to recall, like a number, a name, an acronym, or a formula, embedded in a declarative sentence that supplies the context.
Only cloze things worth memorizing exactly. Don't blank conceptual descriptions or whole phrases. That's enumeration in disguise.
Skip orphan facts
Not every fact deserves a card. A good card holds something up: a mechanism, an intuition, a relationship, vocabulary other cards depend on. A card that holds nothing up, and that nothing else leans on, is dead weight in your queue.
The test: if you forgot this card a year from now, would your grasp of the subject genuinely weaken, or would you just lose a stray fact?