Reviewing Highlights

Can I use keyboard shortcuts in Readwise?

Keyboard shortcuts are the best. Here's a list of shortcuts you can use in the Readwise web app:

Can I customize how often documents appear in my Daily Review?

Yes! This is called Frequency Tuning, and there are a few ways you can adjust it.

From your account settings

You can customize how often any document (or document type) appears in your Daily Review by editing your Frequency Tuning (Account > Configure Reviews > Frequency Tuning).

1. Select a source type to adjust, e.g. books, articles, podcasts, supplemental books, etc.
2. Edit the frequency of all documents from that source type.
3. Edit the frequency of individual documents.

From your Library

You can adjust the frequency of any individual document from your Library by clicking the down arrow to the far right of the item in the list.

From your Daily Review

You can adjust the frequency of a document when it appears in your Daily Review by clicking into the down arrow menu in the top right of the card.

How do I return to the original article where I took a highlight?

You can return to the original source of any highlight by clicking or tapping the down-arrow in the upper right corner of any highlight and selecting View in [Source].

Will deleting a highlight in Readwise delete the original or vice versa?

If you delete (or discard) a highlight in Readwise, the highlight in the original source will not be deleted. This includes Amazon Kindle, Apple Books, Instapaper, Pocket, and other integrations. Similarly, if you delete the highlight in the original source, the highlight will not be deleted in Readwise.

The one exception is if you delete a highlight from Amazon Kindle and then force a full refresh. In that case, any previously imported but now deleted highlights in Kindle will also be deleted from your Readwise account.

Why can't I permanently delete highlights?

The reason that Readwise only uses a soft Discard rather than a hard Delete might seem odd at first, but it's fairly intuitive once you understand the rationale:

Readwise synchronizes your highlights from a variety of sources. For instance, if you hard-deleted a Kindle highlight in Readwise but not in the original Kindle source, then the next time Readwise is synced with Kindle, Readwise would see the deleted highlight as new. The previously deleted highlight would then be re-imported to Readwise, causing it to return from the dead like a frustrating zombie highlight.

We could always just delete the highlight from the frontend in Readwise and save a copy in the backend to compare against future syncs, but that would be misleading and frustrate users who want to recover an accidentally deleted highlight.

If permanently annihilating a highlight is important to you, then we advise you to do so in the original source. Then refresh those highlights within Readwise via the following steps:

1. Select the down arrow next to the book/article to open the document options
2. Select Refresh Highlights
3. Re-sync highlights from source here: readwise.io/welcome/sync?refresh=true

Why is my Daily Review empty? What is the Highlight Quality Filter?

The Highlight Quality Filter is a feature that checks for "low quality" highlights, such as sentence fragments, and blocks them from being included in Daily Reviews. It's enabled by default, but there may be some instances where you might prefer to turn it off.

For example, some users (especially those whose highlights are primarily in character-based writing systems such as Hanzi, Kanji, or Arabic) might see an error on their Daily Review page that says: "This review doesn't have any highlights anymore: perhaps you deleted or changed them since it was created?"

This can happen because the quality filter is mistaking shorter sentences (containing a smaller number of characters than expected) as fragments and hiding them.

To turn off the Highlight Quality Filter, go to the account menu, click Configure Reviews, then select the Review Settings tab. The Highlight Quality Filter is the last option on the page.

How can I create custom reviews of highlights (Themed Reviews)?

While you can customize which documents are included in your Daily Review using the Configure Reviews tab, you can also create customized reviews for specific topics using our Themed Reviews feature.

Using Themed Reviews, you can build sets of highlights based on any combination of books, articles, tweets, notes, and tags, separate from your Daily Review. You can also optimize when your Themed Review is delivered — whether that be on specific days of the week or even just once a month.

You can access the feature by scrolling to the bottom of your Dashboard and selecting Themed Reviews.

How does the Readwise spaced repetition algorithm work (Mastery)?

The Readwise spaced repetition algorithm (Mastery) is admittedly a bit of a black box compared to powerful spaced repetition software (SRS) such as Anki or SuperMemo. This is because we're trying to create a spaced repetition alternative that is extremely user-friendly, compared to the existing offerings that have notoriously steep learning curves.

That said, here are the details behind the Readwise spaced repetition algorithm:

• We use a decaying algorithm based on a recall probability half-life rather than a date-based algorithm as found in Anki.
• The initial half-life of a Mastery later is 14 days. Soon is 7 days. Someday is 28 days.
• Once a highlight recall probability decays to 50% or lower, it becomes a candidate to be resurfaced in the latter half of your Daily Review.

If you have a lot of Mastery flashcards that are candidates to be resurfaced (that is, their probability of recall is calculated to be less than 50%), then those with the lowest recall probability will be resurfaced in your Daily Review.

You can see all your Mastery flashcards, their half-lives, and their recall probabilities here: readwise.io/mastery.