Cloze deletion (the gap-fill technique)

Paste a poem or a passage below and move the sliders. A deleted word keeps its original width, so the shape of the verse never shifts — you read it again and fill the gaps yourself. Stuck on one? Tap the blank to peek.

How to use it

Read the full text once. Then press Next step and read it aloud again, filling the gaps yourself. If it flows, move on; if you stumble, drop back a step. On the opening line of Shakespeare’s eighteenth sonnet the five steps look like this:

The two sliders do different jobs. Delete words removes whole words. Delete letters keeps the word but hollows it out, so there is still a frame to hold on to — that is step 4, which leaves only first letters. For a hard passage, raise the letters first and the words afterwards.

What the technique is called

Leaving a gap in a sentence for the reader to fill is cloze deletion. Leaving more gaps on each pass is progressive cloze deletion, or graduated text deletion.

Withdrawing a cue piece by piece until none is left — exactly what the Delete letters slider does — has a name of its own: the method of vanishing cues. Glisky, Schacter and Tulving introduced it in 1986 while rehabilitating memory in brain-injured patients. They gave the first few letters of a word, then took one letter away on each trial, until the patient produced the word with no cue at all. Fading cues names the same thing.

What all three share: you have to retrieve the words rather than reread them. Rereading makes text feel familiar, and familiarity is not memory.