Main idea

A flash card can be a quotation, 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 click. The card then becomes a small essay, and it loses what gave it its function.

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 structure of the card, nor the quality of the template, but the force with which it lets you incorporate an idea.

A card that deserves its status stands on its own. If it needs to be distilled, explained or completed to hold up, it wasn't an anchor point but one more note. It is not the complete map of a territory.

Layer added on 2026-09-20. The division gains a third support. The note base keeps the sources and the developments; a handwritten notebook keeps what gets built during a session — the arrows, the dependencies, the oppositions between cards laid out on a table. The card itself doesn't move: not during review, and not when a new situation displaces what it organizes. What protects it in practice isn't discipline, it's the format: a card the size of an A7 has no room for a line of reasoning.

Why it matters

It gives an immediate holding test, applicable at the moment of writing: is what you're 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 added paragraph takes a little of that property away.

Nuances and limits

An idea that genuinely doesn't fit in a few lines does exist. That doesn't make it inferior — it simply belongs to the note base, which is built to carry it.

And brevity alone guarantees nothing: a short sentence can be hollow, concision isn't force.

Open questions

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