Deck craft4 / 5
In this guide
Deck craft
Write for the stranger
Your cards will be studied by someone who wasn't in your head.
What & why
When you write a deck, all the cards sit in front of you in order, and everything makes sense. But a learner meets them one at a time, shuffled, sometimes months apart, with no memory of the card before. A card that leans on its neighbours — “the verb above”, “as we saw earlier” — falls apart the moment it arrives alone. Write each card so it stands completely on its own.
The rule
Every card must make sense in isolation. No “above”, “earlier”, or “the previous one” — the learner won’t have it.
Bad → good
A real entry from the World Capitals catalog deck. Tap a card to reveal its answer.
Depends on a card the learner may not have seen for weeks.
Names its own subject — makes sense arriving alone.
When it applies
Every card, but watch especially for cards you wrote in a burst on one topic — that’s where “the other one” and “same as before” sneak in. Re-read each front as if it’s the only card you’ll ever see. If it references something not on the card itself, name that thing explicitly.
The same goes for pronouns and shorthand: “he”, “it”, “that period” all assume context the learner doesn’t have. Spell out who and what.