Main idea

A flash card can be a quote, a sentence, a formula, a small piece of text. The temptation is to enrich it: add the source, the nuance, the counter-example, the development that made it clear. The card then becomes a little essay, and it loses what made it work.

The division is simple: the note base keeps the sources, the developments, the nuances and the links; the card keeps the pillar. What matters is not the card's structure, nor the quality of the template, but the force with which it lets an idea be internalized.

A card that deserves its status stands on its own. If it needs to be distilled, explained or completed in order to stand, then it was not an anchor point but one more note. It is not the complete map of a territory.

Why it matters

It gives an immediate test of soundness, applicable at the moment of writing: is what you are adding necessary for the sentence to carry, or only for it to be justifiable?

And it preserves manipulability, which is no detail: a card is reread, held, moved, memorized. Every paragraph added takes a little of that property away.

Nuances and limits

Ideas that genuinely do not fit in a few lines exist. They are not inferior for that — they simply belong to the note base, which is built to carry them.

And brevity alone guarantees nothing: a short sentence can be hollow, concision is not force.

Open questions

• Is a card that needs a minimum of context to be understood months later still a card?