Continuing our tour through the more unusual questions that come up on television, we’ll make a quick stop in the land of grammar. While there’s not a lot of questions covering grammar to justify dedicating time to it, the lessons we can draw from how it deviates from other questions is a reason to study them, if only briefly.
Grammar questions are rare because they don’t fit the format in the same way other questions do. Grammar questions typically have two components: the sample passage, and the actual question relating to the passage, which demands identification of a example of a grammatical term present in the sample. No matter in which order the two parts are read, there’s a problem. If the sample passage is last, there’s really only one point for buzzing in the question. If the sample passage is first, then the question becomes one exercising the players’ short-term memory. Players have to remember the entire passage in this arrangement, and then apply that memory to the question.
This is pretty much the most intensive use of short-term memory in quizbowl. The closest second would be questions that are limited by making the list of possible answers known in advance of asking the question. Something like, “Of red, yellow blue, green, or white, what color best describes…” The problem with that idea is it’s died out on the circuit, it only made sense to use in bonus questions, and on television that part of listing answers in advance has been replaced with visual presentation.
The one path that keeps grammar questions at a slow but steady rate is Knowledge Bowl, specifically Knowledge Bowl questions that get adapted to television. Since Knowledge Bowl has a written exam portion for its opening rounds, all of the grammar questions become significantly easier in that format. Once they are exported to a televised format however, the questions that were part of the written exam are blended into the oral presentations, and that shift, while unnoticed by the show’s editors, makes all the difference in possibilities of question conversion.
Offhand, I can see two ways to streamline grammar questions for television: First, a visual presentation of the sample passage would eliminate the memory problem, but reduces the overall length of the question and provide far less think time that would be useful without rule changes. The second option, providing a directive to have “Pencil and paper ready,” isn’t much better. It would imply that writing the sample passage down would help the team, but the practice would have to be imported from computation questions in the same format. And currently there are very few television shows which use both. Combining the two suggestions makes no sense, of course, but directing a visual presentation to the viewer, and not to the teams would allow both participants to be aided in their comprehension of the question.
Of course, whether one should continue these is a question in and of itself.
While sitting in Columbus on my semi-vacation this week I came up with a half-baked idea, which I’d like to share with you as a possible project after the book completes. The idea is not so much a practice set as much as a series of organized rounds of mostly history questions. But instead of by subject, everything is in chronological order. It wouldn’t even pretend to be truly subject balanced, but where there are books of timelines of world history, this would just be questions slotted in a timeline of world history, and converted into a book or e-text.
The reason this is half-baked is because I immediately realized the workload required to accomplish this was more than I was willing to put in, and it would require a strong editorial effort of pagesetting. The reason I think it’s at least partially baked is that I know there is a market for such a product, and that by slipping around the constraints quiz bowl places around itself for creating content (packet distribution, length, etc.), it might be easier to create this than say the equivalent amount of questions for even an entry level tournament.
I’m kicking it around in the back of my head for the past couple days, but haven’t found the fatal flaw in it outside of it’s a lot of work. So if you’ve already figured out the killshot which destroys this, pass it along.
During the week back at work, I’ve been moving my stuff to a new desktop machine, and one of my spot checks that I had gotten everything off the old machine was looking through a couple directories of notes I had written. One of these files was named OTW.txt, and in finding that I realized I had a companion piece to the above half-baked notion.
OTW meant “of the week.” It was an idea for a weekly newsletter where each week would cover a series of items one week at a time. So for example a single edition might have a poem OTW, a chemical OTW, a battle OTW, and so on, and the next week would have the same categories, but new instances. Some of the content would be written by myself, or collected from some of the study guides I’ve written, but the vast majority of the items would be links to online collections. The result would be a more structured version of some of the Things to Read This Week, or the You Gotta Know format sliced crossways, and targeting a much more inexperienced quiz consumer. And in that format you could cover longer or shorter lists than You Gotta Knows (which tries to be between 10 to 12 items) handles, or add some more open ended and simpler categories. While it would target beginning teams, it could be used by coaches at all levels and players from pub quiz to international competition, as you’d have lots of articles each week in categories you were weak in.
I can see a time after the book is completed where this substack could turn into OTW. I figure there’s a massive amount of setup involved but then the project really could be queued up to run automatically for years. The biggest problems I saw with the idea were crediting the sites that you linked to, and having enough of a backlog in place when you began the project. Less of a problem but more of an opportunity, I saw that this was an idea that could scale and be a collaborative effort, with different people curating different lists handed out over weeks, allowing it to outlast people’s interest in maintaining the project. So if you might be interested in being the first mover in this potential market, go ahead. You’ve got until I’m done with the book before I pick a new project, before I decide if this is really baked.