One Fact Per Card

Asked to turn a passage into flashcards, the base model tends to mirror the shape of the source: a paragraph that lists four causes becomes one card — "Q: What are the causes of the French Revolution? A: fiscal crisis, food shortage, Enlightenment ideas, and a weak monarch." A sentence with two facts in it becomes one card that quizzes both. A dense definition becomes a single fill-in-the-blank with half the sentence deleted. These cards look faithful to the material, and they are useless to study from: the learner either recalls all four items or "fails" the card, a card that tests two facts can't tell which one they've forgotten, and a giant blank has no single answer to check against.

Good flashcards obey the minimum-information principle: each card tests exactly one fact, with one unambiguous answer. It is the discipline behind every serious study deck. The unit of a deck is not "a card per paragraph," it's "a card per fact" — so a single sentence packed with facts becomes several small cards, and that is correct, not wasteful. Small cards are recalled faster, scored honestly, and scheduled independently, so the one fact you keep forgetting gets the repetition it needs without dragging the three you already know.

When to Activate

Activate when someone hands over content and wants it turned into cards for memorization — flashcards, study cards, Anki cards, Q&A cards, review cards. Signals: "make flashcards from this," "turn these notes into study cards," "I need cards to memorize this vocab / these dates / this chapter." Convert whatever they give you — notes, a passage, a definition, a term list, a diagram's labels — into atomic cards.

Do NOT activate to schedule reviews or reason about spaced-repetition timing (when to see a card again), to summarize or explain the material without producing cards, or to grade a learner's answers to questions (that is assessment, not authoring).

The Rules (what the base skips by default)

1. One fact per card. If a card's answer contains two facts that could be forgotten independently, split it into two cards. "The Battle of Hastings was in 1066, in England" is two facts — a date card and a place card — not one.
2. Break every enumeration into separate cards. Never write a card whose answer is "list all N of…". A four-item list becomes four cards, each testing one item by its role or relationship ("Which Enlightenment idea fueled the Revolution's demand for representation?"), not one card demanding the whole set.
3. Keep fill-in-the-blank to a single blank. A cloze card deletes exactly one fact; the rest of the sentence stays as the cue. Never delete a whole sentence or blank out several words at once — that leaves no single answer to check.
4. One unambiguous answer. Avoid "what are some…", "name a few…", "list examples of…" — open-ended prompts have many valid answers and can't be self-graded. Ask for the one specific fact.
5. Both sides short. Put shared context in the question stem; keep the answer to the single fact. If the answer runs to a sentence of prose, the card is testing too much.
6. Each card stands alone. No "as mentioned above," no "from the passage," no dependence on another card's wording. A card must make sense pulled out of the deck at random three weeks later.
7. Prefer a direct question over restating the source. Turn "The mitochondrion produces ATP" into "Q: What does the mitochondrion produce? A: ATP", not a statement the learner passively rereads.

What Breaks It

• A card whose answer is a list, a set, or "all of the following."
• A single card that quizzes two independent facts (a date and a place, a term and its author).
• A fill-in-the-blank with more than one blank, or one that deletes most of the sentence.
• An open-ended prompt ("name some causes") with no single checkable answer.
• A card that only makes sense if you've read the surrounding passage or another card first.

Micro-Example

> Source: "Photosynthesis occurs in the chloroplast and converts carbon dioxide and water into glucose and oxygen, using energy from sunlight." > > Fat card (what the base tends to do): > - Q: Describe photosynthesis. → A: It occurs in the chloroplast and converts CO₂ and water into glucose and oxygen using sunlight. (one card, four+ facts, no single answer to check) > > Atomic cards (minimum information): > - Q: In which organelle does photosynthesis occur? → A: the chloroplast > - Q: What two raw inputs does photosynthesis consume? → split further: Q: Photosynthesis consumes water and which gas? → A: carbon dioxide > - Q: What energy-storing molecule does photosynthesis produce? → A: glucose > - Q: Besides glucose, what gas does photosynthesis release? → A: oxygen > - Q: Photosynthesis draws its energy from what source? → A: sunlight > > One source sentence, five small cards — each recalled and scored on its own.