How important is it to write your own spaced repetition memory prompts?

• Prompt-writing supports reading comprehension
• Apart from the general process effects on comprehension, prompt-writing probably produces more reliable long-term memory of the specific details in the prompts, via Elaborative encoding effects.

References

Nielsen, M. (2018). Augmenting Long-term Memory. http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html

The act of constructing an Anki card is itself nearly always a form of elaborative encoding. It forces you to think through alternate forms of the question, to consider the best possible answers, and so on. I believe this is true for even the most elementary cards. And it certainly becomes true if you construct more complex cards, cards relating the basic fact to be remembered to other ideas (like the Telstar-ASCII link), gradually building up a web of richly interrelated ideas.