Cloze deletion
Cloze deletion is the fill-in-the-blank flashcard format: a sentence is shown with one key word hidden, and you must recall the missing piece in context. Keeping the surrounding context makes the card easier to learn and the memory easier to use in real situations.
The name comes from "closure" — the mind’s tendency to complete a familiar pattern. A cloze card shows something like "The capital of Japan is ___" and asks you to produce the missing word. Because the rest of the sentence is present, you retrieve the fact embedded in meaning rather than as a bare, contextless pair.
Context-rich cards tend to be both easier to acquire and more useful, because you practise recalling the fact in roughly the form you will need it. They are especially powerful for language learning, where a word in a real sentence teaches grammar, collocation, and usage all at once.
The main caution is to delete only one idea per card. A sentence with several blanks becomes ambiguous and tests too many things at once, which undermines clean retrieval.
How EverFlip does this
EverFlip cards put the prompt on the front and the answer on the back, so you can build cloze-style, context-rich cards — a full sentence with the target word as the answer — when you create or import your own decks.