Sometimes you just want to do writing prompts for a while, without having to switch gears and think about tones or definitions. Or maybe you want to minimize switching between keyboard and pen/mouse, so you want to turn reading prompts off for a little while, or get them all at out of the way. Perhaps you just have a giant review queue and you want to finish it as efficiently as possible. But when you go to turn some parts off in the settings menu while studying, then it messes up your word adding: new words are missing whatever parts you had disabled when the word got added to My Words. Now everything’s messed up!
We’ve just made a couple changes to the way that menu works. We are renaming it to Temporary Parts Study, distinguishing it from the main options which are in the study settings portion of your account preferences. This temporary mode disables adding for you, so that you don’t accidentally skip over parts of some words that you’ll want after you turn those parts back on. It also lets you know what’s going on with a hopefully-unobtrusive reminder at the top of your study area. I’ve been using it to clear all my writing reviews at once before moving on to the others, so that I don’t have to put down my pen to do reading prompts as often.
The other way to go with this would have been to try to keep adding enabled, but add all the parts for each word despite not being able to review them until you turned this mode off. We weighed it, but it seemed dangerous to build up this backlog of new items which could easily overwhelm you, so this is what we came up with. Have a try, and let us know what you think–does it fit your needs?