[NOTE: As I type this up in CMU's practice, I was shocked to watch a Second Swiss Sanitarium error occur before my eyes, and then have the team discuss it as “a second Swiss sanitarium.” The Second Swiss Sanitarium being a problem I discussed on the facebook discussion page for the first book.
I didn't include the Second Swiss Sanitarium in my things that we can learn from the tournament questions, but I did have the 'clocks in paintings' in an original list of small lessons, until I realized these just aren't applicable for a high school team, yet. But it was too meta a moment not to be noted here.]
During this week’s practice I spent the first half hour reviewing pieces from the tournament the team competed in on the 18th. I had pulled the clues I felt were likely to repeat themselves, and then chopped them into patterns that would also repeat themselves because of writers’ habits. I’m going to go through the major list of items with you here. There’s a little trick to this, in that I can’t get into specifics with the clue selection, but I have to talk in general structure, so I will use the same disclaimer I used last week.
** Please note that I'm not pointing out specific details from the tournament any more than the obvious, since the tournament questions are still being used.
There are smaller patterns I didn’t include in this listing, but because those will identify material from the questions more easily, I will not touch them until such time as the set is clear.
I began using the shorthand “X matter(s)” for this, more that it sounded important and authoritative coming out of my mouth. It’s not quite that simple, just that these are common types of last clues and mid-level clues that writers use as shorthand to add clues to questions, and players with experience have learned to expect to be present in questions so they do learn these.
Capitals matter
This is kind of one of the most obvious last clues there is, but we note it for reinforcement. There were at least five points in the set where you could profit from knowing the capital of a nation, of a region, or a state, and that is a known fact about questions, that a question where the answer is a geographic region has a tried and true last clue which is its capital.
Former names matter
For geographical regions, what they were once called, in another language, in their own language, or under the domination of another country are easy clues to fit into a question. Geographical name changes are also important to follow because the reason for the old name to be changed to the new name often gives clues to the answer that a player could take advantage of.
Superlatives matter
There were questions which cited the highest peak, the longest river, the least populated territory, and the directional extremities of nations.
Flags matter, again.
There was a point in which the flag of a nation was one of the most important things to know about them, and then when people tired of translating a visual medium into a oral retelling, it became passe, and then somewhat frowned upon knowledge. It seems that in the past couple years, it is no longer a knock against the writer to cite information about the flag in their question, as long as the context of the flag is mentioned.
Longtime and first rulers matter.
This shouldn't be surprising in that a clue which says the first leader of a country is significant when asking for the person or the country. Any longtime ruler of a state is fair game for being the subject of a question, and if it's a bonus part, the leader can be the start of a template of two bonus parts that naturally follow.
These five things that matter share a pattern, which I shared with the team, and if you wait until the end of this list, I’ll share with you.
Things that are remakes matter
When something is a remake, a retelling or an adaptation of an existing work, there's four parts that can always be worked together, with three of them as answers. By putting the story details in the leadin, the remake, the remake author, and the original can be set into a template for a bonus, and really any of the four can appear as the first or last part.
Canonical clues about creations for which a particular creator is a one-hit wonder leads to the question about the creator being really about the process of creating the creation.
Basically the question doesn't have enough information to describe the other works of the creator at this level, so it takes details from the creation and reflects them through the filter of the creator, what they did, how they did it, and what inspired their creative process.
Note how "quantity" is used. Quantity is not the unit used to measure the quantity.
While this may be a function of the word choice of NAQT writers particularly, most writers have settled on using "quantity" over "property" in describing physical quantities. This is a bit of jargon which quiz bowl throws at new students that tends to lead to early negs on questions, where the wrong answer is the SI unit, when the answer is the quantity. It's worth spending a minute teaching your team that the quantity is volt_age_ but the unit is volt, and you cannot rely on the charity of the moderator.
If a book had a social or historical impact greater than its literary impact, it will continue to be asked about in literature questions, despite not really being part of the literature curriculum.
I can't really cite the canonical examples for this, but if you're thinking about this, you've probably come up with your example, and it's a good example.
The identifier clue matters for you to answer
I hadn't really explained to the team what I meant by the identifier, so I figured I'd insert it here. The identifier is the earliest pronoun or phrase beginning with "this" or "these" in a tossup. It is a clue that attaches a classification to the answer, reducing down the possible answers. It is not a uniquely identifying clue, but it can exist either within or ahead of the first uniquely identifying clue. The identifier is important it gives context to the clues answering how the information should be specified. A clue relating to an event taking place in a city could have as the answer the city, the state, the nation, or the year, depending on the identifier. Forgetting the identifier leads to negs, but a particularly damaging form of neg, where the moderator has to prompt, and the opposition can then use the wrong answer as a further clue not included by the writer.
Midas Clues
I had referred to Midas clues on the Facebook page for the first book, but I hadn't included this in the new book, nor had I mentioned it to the new team. I should do so for both, so I don't sound deranged when I shout "Midas!" about something that comes up.
Midas clues are clues that are more obscure than the expected more common clue, but because there's so little askable about a particular answer, the middle range clues appear with near certainty in questions with that answer. Using the answer of Midas, most people immediately know the last clues of Midas and the golden touch. So that last clue is well established. There are a small number of other clues that come from other mythological stories involving Midas, the most common of which is his judging a music competition between Apollo and Pan. After judging Pan the winner, Midas was cursed by Apollo and was given the ears of an ass. Because there are so few non-golden touch clues about Midas, the clues about the music contest end up in most Midas questions. Because this is such a common pattern, your value in studying Midas is entirely based in knowing about the contest, and not the most common thing that people generally associate with Midas.
The CIA World Factbook
In listing these types of clues and the study targets you can set from them, I noticed that there was a large number of themes relating to an even larger number of geographic clues. This put me in the mind of one of the most powerful sources that early quiz bowl writers had, and I was certain that it still existed.
When I first ran across the CIA World Factbook, it was looking at the Carpenter Hall sale rack of books that the Cornell's Engineering Library couldn't justify keeping for next year. After finding the flag-covered paperback cover of the 1994 edition, I thumbed through the front of The World section and realized that even if it was two years out of date, it had an abundance of information you could use to write questions where nations were the answer, and study for quiz bowl.
The World section is set up as an alphabetical listing of nations and territories, with information about the geographic region included by category. Each category of information is split out into a separate paragraph entry, so each country would be listed with a section about its capital, its borders, major waterways and lakes, land features, political parties and leaders, text descriptions of their flag, and a short history of the nation from its founding. Basically every clue that could appear from the middle to the last clue for a world history, international current events, or geography question appeared somewhere in this book. As a paper copy, this was powerful for coming up with ideas for questions and was one of the books I kept close to me during the early years of NAQT.
At one point in the 2000's I found its text had been scanned and put on a non-government website, and a key improvement was made to the text. In addition to having the sections grouped by the nation, they could be looked at one category of information at a time. Being able to flip the table of data in such a way to be able to see things like all the official languages of the world at once, or all the lists of national borders at once, allowed me to consider new ideas for questions which I then wrote.
When considering this set of clues this week, I went back to see if the World Factbook was still there, as I had not been looking at it for a long time. It was back in place where I last saw it. https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/ and they'd actually worked on the interface since I had been there last in the 2000s, which was why I had lost track of it. Most importantly, they had included a way to search for all nations' information in a single category, incorporating the feature which had given it extra value.
Finally, this week I handed out a study sheet for ballet. I cheated a lot in this. I just took the two You Gotta Knows on ballet, and clipped eight entries. If you need this for yourself, just clip Appalachian Spring, Giselle, The Firebird, The Nutcracker, Rodeo, Romeo and Juliet, Sleeping Beauty, and Swan Lake, and paste into a document. Add a paragraph citing Robert Chu's work in the two YGK lists, and note the original list was for college, and point those with more interest in the category to those webpages, and you're done!