Andrew Yaphe's post to begin this thread is the most interesting QB post I've read in awhile. (Caveat: I don't read many QB posts and have barely skimmed the thread of which his post is an off-shoot.) Having been ambivalent whether to post this here or there, I'll put some first impressions here and if they read well, maybe clean it up into a post there.
I do strongly agree with how he describes the thought process of a good player, as follows:
A good player listening to this tossup (or any other) is not sitting there, his mind a blank slate, waiting to hear the first trigger word that will cause him to make a knee-jerk buzz. Instead, he's mulling over what he's been told, formulating possible answers, ruling some of them out, and waiting until he hears something that will tip one of those possible answers from "possible" to "sufficiently probable for me to take a chance on it." If he's lucky, he'll hear some sort of confirmatory word (like "cyclical") as he takes the plunge. If he's unlucky, he'll hear something that suggests his thinking was terribly off-course. Either way, an active process of deduction has been going on the whole time.
I hate it when people seem to imply that the good quiz play boils down to cold knowledge of which clues fit which answers - playing the game often entails the deduction Yaphe describes, or the buzzes to which one could say "well solved."
I'm ambivalent about this factual observation in the next paragraph though. Up to a point the observation is true, though not completely, and I think I disagree with any normative implication:
That's one of the main reasons for the tossups in ACF to be as long as they are: to allow time for this to happen. At NAQT, there's basically no time for this kind of thinking to proceed: the game moves much faster, the tossups are much shorter, and people are either buzzing on clues they know or on instinct.
ACF [the general format rather than the specific entity] first: If the idea were solely to allow players time to think, then in theory there could just be periods of silence between sentences rather than string upon string of sentences. Of course, the idea is that the strings of sentences bring a steady stream of useful information. In a well-written pack this is true.
In a poorly written pack there will be a lot of filler words relative to clueful content. The filler words will parse very awkwardly and the act of distilling the clues from between them will be both tedious and taxing. (I don't think there was much of this at 2005 ACF fall. Packs were edited quite well, even if here and there some sentences were still quite a mouthful to read.)
As for NAQT [again, the general style rather than the entity alone - full disclosure: I'm an NAQT member and writer; if you write for NAQT then you're probably aware of Yaphe's own level of involvement], in a best case scenario the cap on tossup length forces tight enough prose to get rid of the chaff. Certain types of especially verbose clues become impossible to elaborate as well as one would like (which makes the ACF style indispensable as a format alternative) but you can do a lot in a little space - indeed, you have to.
When he says "there's basically no time for this kind of thinking to proceed," I think he underestimates how much thought processing players (including and especially those as good as himself) actually do in a relatively short time. Think of things smart people do a lot that requires split-second decisions where a lot of information might be relevant - anything from a doctor diagnosing a patient to a poker player at a casino.
A good analogy might be postal chess to over-the-board tournament chess. (Someone with a different take on quiz formats might claim that the analogy is postal to speed, or even normal OTB time controls to speed.)
In any case, the phrase "on instinct" is accurate enough and perhaps complete enough, though it's easy for that phrase to (appear to) short-sell what it describes. This is "instinct" in the sense that Malcom Gladwell writes about in Blink, I suppose.
As for writing and editing questions, a bad NAQT-length tossup is readily identifiable as crap, to the extent that it's random, abrupt, and nearly content-free. Writing a tossup to that length that avoids the pitfalls is difficult, though quite possible.
It's much easier to write a good ACF-style tossup, though all the more difficult to write a great ACF-style tossup, and deceptively easy to write a deceptively bad tossup that length. So much of this probably just has to do with making sure the prose isn't turgid, and to that end I apologize for the density of this post's prose itself.
Posted by Matt Bruce at November 18, 2005 12:20 AMThat Andrew Yaphe is a clever fellow, even if he did use the word "ruminative." The other benefit of the toss-ups that he praises is that by providing interesting and substantive information they may actually encourage people to learn more about the subject, or in this case, read the work.
Posted by: Brian Rostron at November 18, 2005 10:18 AMIf only it were more frequent that tossups this length provided information interesting and substantive enough to make one want to learn more. :-)
Unfortunately, some of them aren't all that interesting, and many more that are moderately interesting have their appeal squashed by the mumbled, mispronounced monotone of a lot of invitational readers.
(This isn't a knock on readers, especially since they're volunteering their time (our time: I read ACF fall), but sight-reading text is difficult, especially sight-reading text written at a very high reading comprehension level.)
Posted by: me at November 18, 2005 10:43 AMWell, I wouldn't be a big supporter of the extent of verbosity that Andrew would probably embrace. The question cited could have two sentences excised with no discernible loss of any quality that I can see. And I'm not entirely convinced of the notion that question length leads to a more contemplative process. Pyramidal structure in any format gives an advantage to knowledge and intuition. I do think that a certain amount of information depth, which to some extent is probably correlated with length, does contribute to an environment where thoroughly knowing a concept or being well-acquainted with a work is rewarded. Where question length is a lethal experience at somewhere such as ACF is a room with two teams comprised primarily of novice players who repeatedly after five or six sentences of turgid prose continue to sit in stunned silence long after the giveaway clue is revealed.
Posted by: Brian Rostron at November 18, 2005 01:09 PMThe point when I started to realize what Yaphe was describing in TRASH, which wasn't all that long ago, honestly made me enjoy the game that much more. Your points were spot on ... you can have the same thought process on a shorter question. Just because you don't go through three levels of rumination on it doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
The longer you play, the more often you'll be able to discern "Why was this question written?" and "What topical thing they could be asking?" It's far more satisfying to get a question you have no business knowing, to me, than it is to get something you just know because you know it.
Posted by: Cooch at November 20, 2005 02:01 PM