Pick five words from your last week of reading and put each on a review card with its sentence. Prefer words you have met more than once across texts over rare one-offs, and review them today, because words you actually met anchor best.
The practice loop
Pick up yesterday's cards first. Say each word aloud, then give your own sentence for it before flipping the card to check meaning. Allow about four minutes for the five words, under a minute each.
Sort the five into two piles: recalled easily and struggled. This takes about one minute. The struggled pile stays in tomorrow's session; the easy ones move to a review slot three days ahead, so testing happens at wider and wider gaps.
Spend about eight minutes reading anything you enjoy, and write down up to three new words as you go. Only words you have already met elsewhere, or that recur in this text, earn a card; skip rare one-offs.
In the last two minutes, choose one word from the struggled pile and use it twice in real writing today, for example a message or journal line, so retrieval happens in use and not just on the card.
One session demonstrated
Here is the full session, worked from first card to last. Suppose your five words are gather, reluctant, surface, shift and eventually, each on a card with its sentence from your reading.
Start with reluctant. Say it aloud, then cover the card and make your own sentence: I was reluctant to admit the mistake. Flip and check; the meaning fits, so it moves to the three-day pile with gather and surface, which also came back easily. You fumble shift and eventually, so both stay in tomorrow's stack, where the harder sorting work happens.
Next, read a news article for about eight minutes. You meet shift twice, once about climate and once about policy, which confirms it recurs, and no new word seems worth a card today, a fine outcome.
Finish with two journal lines using eventually: I eventually found the file, though it took an hour. Producing the word from memory in real writing is what helps it stick, not seeing it again.
That is one session, roughly fifteen minutes. Write the date beside each card you used, so the next session starts from evidence rather than memory.
Self-check and the next adjustment
Flip-test yourself first. Say each word aloud and give your own sentence before checking the meaning. Three or more of five recalled is a solid session; write the count beside the date so tomorrow starts from a measurement, not a guess.
Count the words that genuinely fumbled, the ones with no sentence at all. A struggled pile of one or two is the ideal size: the review gap is wide but not empty.
Apply one adjustment. If everything came back easily, move the easy pile from a three-day review to five days. If more than two failed, skip tomorrow's new-reading step and spend that time using the failed words in real writing.
Keep a simple tally on each card, one mark per date. Ten or more separate meetings is a commonly cited threshold for picking a word up through repeated exposure, though exact counts vary across studies, so treat the tally as a trend, not a quota.
Expect recall to strengthen with spacing rather than crowding. One reading study found that after three months, eight exposures gave only about a 50% chance of recall, and the authors recommended more than twenty for durable learning. Growing tallies are your evidence of progress.
Next session, start with the tallest tallies and the struggled pile, and let tomorrow's counts decide the gap.