Team Question Writing Requirement

Team members are encouraged to write original quizbowl questions in as great a volume and with as great a frequency as possible. Question writing is a tremendously effective means of improving as a player, and you will find that the best players also tend to be prolific question writers. The progressive acts of thinking about question writing, doing the necessary research (do not try to write many if any questions without consulting good reference works!), and struggling with the ordering of clues and the appropriate wording, is remarkably effective as a means of retaining for yourself what you write about. Once you have written a question about something, you have a leg up on others every time another question on the same topic is encountered as a player. You tend to remember stuff you've written about, and will tend to beat others to the buzzer when similar clues come up again. As your coach, I encourage you to write questions as often as you can. Some players always have a notebook handy, in which they can jot down ideas for questions as they think of them, or interesting factoids they can use, as they encounter them. The more you write, the more you're likely to improve!

Beyond the usefulness of question-writing for player development, there is also the practical matter that the team needs original student-produced packets to enter teams in many of the invitational tournaments in which we compete.

Therefore, this minimal requirement for full participation on the Carleton Academic Quiz Team:

Every player must, at some point prior to playing in any intercollegiate packet-submission tournament in a second year with the team, have turned in at least one full packet of original questions -- 22 tossups and 22 bonuses, subject balanced as per the guidelines below. A second such submission is required at some point prior to playing in a packet-submission tournament in a third year, and a third is required prior to playing in a fourth.

Players should take pains with these packets and submit them in as good shape as they can get them. Proofreading and spell-checking is expected. (And fact-checking, which should go without saying!) It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that most people's early question writing isn't usually too great; you improve by continuing to write, paying attention to the mechanics of questions you hear, and by getting feedback from an experienced question editor. I will attempt serious editing feedback to help you all improve as question writers. But I do expect you to make the initial effort to put time and care into what you submit.

What consitutes a packet meeting the minimal requirements? Each tournament for which we must submit packets asks for a different number of questions with different subject breakdowns. Unless I ask you for something slightly different in order to use your packet to meet a particular tournament's specifications, please write at least 22 tossups and 22 bonuses, aimed at an untimed tournament of average collegiate difficulty, with the following subject breakdown for both tossups and bonuses:

4 or 5 History, scattered as to time and place
4 or 5 Literature/Mythology, with some variance of time, genre, language and nationality
4 or 5 Science/Mathematics, from a variety of disciplines
2 or 3 Pop Culture/Sports, a mix of sports or entertainment genres
.. 2 .. Fine Arts, normally one music/performing arts and one visual arts
1 or 2 Geography
1 or 2 Social Sciences, Philosophy, or Religion
1 or 2 Current Events
0 to 3 Mixed, Miscellaneous

"NAQT-style" and "ACF-style" questions vary greatly as to length, and to some extent as to style, though good tossups in either flavor should be precisely targeted as to an answerable answer, with clues arranged "pyramidally" -- that is, moving from more obscure to progressively easier clues, ideally making the single word that comes closest to providing the "giveaway" clue the very last word of the tossup. Players' required packets for the Carleton team may be of either flavor or of mixed flavor. Packets submitted for particular tournaments will of course be re-edited to meet specific tournament guidelines.

Developing question-writers might find it useful to look at question samples available on the NAQT site, or at the online question archive maintained by Stanford University.

It might also be helpful to read general advice on question-writing from an experienced writer, such as this:

http://www.acf-quizbowl.com/documents/howtowrite.php