Cloze Deletion

Cloze deletion is a technique that makes it easy to create questions and answer from facts or sentences, as it saves you from rewriting the fact into a question.

Simple cloze

To make a simple cloze deletion, type a sentence and surround the part you want to memorize in square brackets, like this:

Or you can select the text:

Then press F9, or click the cloze deletion button in the toolbar. The text will change to:

If you have selected text, any text in square brackets will not be converted, only the selected text will be. This allows you to use text with square brackets (such as LaTeX) and cloze deletion at the same time.

Cloze with a hint

If you want to add a hint, type a colon after the information, and add some text. You can do this either with brackets:

Or by selecting:

After you hit F9, the following should appear:

Undoing

If you accidentally created a cloze, you can undo it by hitting F9 again.

Larger sentences, and Anki vs. SuperMemo clozes

If your sentence is larger and has more information, you can extract multiple elements at once.

For example:

Becomes:

However, generally this is not a good idea. The more information you place on one card, the more likely you'll forget part of the information, and have to repeat the card again. The information above is better represented as two separate questions:

Q: When did the space race start?
A: 1957

Q: When did the space race end?
A: 1975

Some programs like SuperMemo allow you to create multiple cloze cards based on a single pasted sentence. For example, if we extract a sentence from Wikipedia about the space race:

The Space Race was a competition of space exploration between the Soviet Union and the United States, which lasted roughly from 1957 to 1975.

You could then select 1957 and SuperMemo would generate a card like this:

Q: The Space Race was a competition of space exploration between the Soviet Union and the United States, which lasted roughly from ... to 1975.
A: 1957

You could then generate another card for the other date, and possibly other parts of the sentence.

The first problem with this approach is that the sentence is too wordy. It takes a comparatively long time to read the question and figure out what you're being asked. This slows down reviews. To alleviate the problem, the sentence needs to be edited first for brevity, and by the time you've done that, you're not going to save a great deal of time over typing the questions yourself.

The second problem is that SuperMemo's approach is not intuitive. There's no indication that a separate card has been added, and it's not easy to return to that card after it's been created. And once you've added all the clozes you wanted, the initial text you pasted in needs to be deleted.

At one point in the future, Anki may have a separate dialog that makes it easier to create multiple cloze cards from a given sentence.