[simbyotic]

Piotr Woznaik recommends turning lists into enumerations. You can see more here: https://www.supermemo.com/en/archives1990-2015/articles/20ru...

In general you want to reduce the amount of things you have to retrieve from memory in one go, and attempting to retrieve a 20 person list is just going to give you problems.

The cloze solution is certainly better than the full list (and does follow the minimum information principle because you just have to retrieve a single name) but the problem is that it doesn't give you any handles. If you have 19 names and Flaubert is hidden, how would you know it's Flaubert that's missing? Long-term you're bound to fail those cards.

But I would also question the premise of the card. Do you expect to have to come up with the 20 names each time you want to talk about 19th century French literature? As in, each time the context is "19th century French literature" is the appropriate knowledge to retrieve "* list of 20 authors *"?

Instead a better approach might be to flip it around and ask yourself, "In which century did Flaubert write Madame Bovary?" or something along those lines. You can both reconstruct the list from that and if you're writing about Flaubert the knowledge that he wrote during the 19th century will come more fluidly to you.

[bibelo]

Thank you.

Your answer and your link (especially the paragraph about sets) help me a lot