In what senses is the mnemonic medium more than an annotation layer on ordinary prose?

A straightforward way to think about the Mnemonic medium is as “text plus.” You write a prose explanation, then you go back through it and annotate it with prompts which reinforce the key ideas. It’s much more interesting, though, to think about ways in which the combination creates a meaningfully new medium—where the questions push the prose around and vice versa. Are there powerful possibilities there, or is it just aggrandizement?

• Mnemonic medium prompts can extend the main text’s discussion, not just repeat it
• Because the medium is so nascent, new texts will usually introduce the purpose of the prompts in the prose.
  • They’ll also sometimes comment on specific prompts after their corresponding areas. For instance, Quantum Country points out a prompt which seems to duplicate an earlier one, and explains why that makes sense in this instance (i.e. Spaced repetition memory prompts should encode ideas from multiple angles)
• Michael Nielsen reports that in later chapters of Quantum Country, he included less review than he might have otherwise (“Recall that the Hermitian…”), because as an author he can rely on the reader knowing those details.