[We are in the recruiting season and the first practice season, so I will recommend reviewing what I said about them both welcoming players with no experience and how best to recruit at the activities fair. This week’s new content is a rework of some things I wrote on the facebook page of the first book and some techniques I’ve mentioned but apparently never completed. ]
The coordinating clues of quiz bowl are those that don't necessarily uniquely identify the answer of a question, but instead severely restrict the possible answers to places along common buckets. The primary coordinates that a clue can be sorted along are:
Geography (Where would you find this answer?)
Language (closely related to Geography if the answer is from the 19th century and back, it's how this answer was expressed or expressed itself.)
Chronology (When did this answer flourish?)
Type (What one word would you use to describe the group that this answer comes from? There can be a subtype which narrows the possible answers further, but that term for the subtype may be given earlier in the question because that term is more obscure. For answers that are a single person that could draw from occupation/position/craft media. )
A coordinating clue takes two or more of these clues and isolates the possible answers down tightly and expressly in a simple declarative phrase:
"French novelist"
"Twentieth-century British prime minister"
"Poem written during World War I"
"Halogen...element"
The last is a combination of subtype and type assuming the player doesn't know that halogens are automatically chemical elements. And in this we are assuming that the clue is separated by another clue. [For those of you yelling that *everyone* who plays quiz bowl knows what a halogen is, just assume I said "pnictogen" and go on. I'm not going to convince you you're wrong, and I can't run both of our experiments on the same audience.]
The common thread of these coordinating clues is that they do not uniquely identify the answer, but they do eliminate a wide variety of possible answers. If they are done well, they manage to knock the answer down to just a few options in two words, providing at least the opportunity to guess an answer.
If you combine the coordinating clues with the implicit assumption that every question is limited by appropriateness to the level of competition, you can often reduce the answer down to a demonstrably likely answer. For example, there are many Canadian authors, but if the question is on television the vast majority of the time the phrase "this Canadian author" is going to refer to Margaret Atwood. The problem with this assumption is this an assumption that is developed by experience.
Television questions tend to place the coordinating clues anywhere they can fit, and the words of the coordinates may be scattered throughout. In contrast, questions on the circuit often make oblique references to the coordinate clues in early clues, but then explicitly state the coordinates between "For 10 points--" and the last clue.
When it’s positioned in that penultimate slot, the coordinating clue can be confirmation of a player’s instincts from the earlier clues, or an clue that eliminates lots of possibilities before a uniquely identifying last clue tips off the largest portion of the players. That effectiveness in two separate contexts is what we want from clues in general, and since a coordinating clue achieves this in a short phrase, it becomes a favorite technique of writers, even if they don’t realize its a choice in writing.
Understanding and using coordinating clues is a good way to organize your mind for quiz bowl, and it’s a trainable aspect of competition. I’m hoping I didn’t explain this before, but I used a particular piece of equipment to build up this idea, and I used it for a lot of methods of training. You can build your own version with a pack of index cards. [I want to say that I mentioned this before in this series, but I had not found my copy. Sometime between then and now, I’ve recreated it and I’ll explain what to do with it.]
On each index card you are to include a coordinating word or phrase that either refers to a time period, a geographic region, or a type of answer.
14th CENTURY / 15th CENTURY — 21st CENTURY — PRESENT-DAY
NORTH AMERICAN — CENTRAL AMERICAN — SOUTH AMERICAN
COMPOSITION — BIOGRAPHY — LEGENDARY FIGURE
You want to construct a set of cards so that all three types of coordinates are represented, if not evenly, so that one type does not have a majority. You want the categories to be broad, not narrow, and you want some terms that are ambiguous, or could refer to multiple classes of answers. (Some interesting ones in my stack “Eastern,” “Coastal,” “Masterpiece,” and “Modern.” A few of the time periods should overlap, a few of the geographic regions can overlap. The key is to be able to take two or three cards from the stack at random and be able to suggest something that could be an answer that all the cards apply to.
This can be used to come up with ideas to write into questions, or to organize categories that spark you or your players to come up with answers that fit as many cards as possible. Two tangible practices to do with them: First, lay out a set of 12-16 of them and think of something that fits one card and combine all cards that are also categories of the answer. Another method is to put cards on the top and left of a 5x5 grid, and fill in the intersection of the row and column with answers that fit the category.
The current iteration of what’s on the cards is attached at the end of this message.
I’m trying to complete this early today. I have a long final task to complete this evening and I’m trying to give it enough time for me to do it. The house at 11 East Pike Houston PA was sold this morning. This was my aunt’s house for twenty years, and my grandmother’s house for 60 years prior, and another relative’s house for a couple decades before that. We have to be out of the house completely at midnight tonight, and there’s some things to go to City Mission, some to go to my parents’ house, and some to go to some antique restoration services. Last weekend, I harvested a patch of flowers that had not been overgrown by poison ivy and about 20 feet of English ivy that had extended off the adjacent building and rooted. My last task is to break up the chain link fences that separate the lawn from the street, roll them up, and take them home with me where they can be used with another 70 feet of fencing from another house the family doesn’t own any more. The house isn’t going to be kept, so it’s last chance to see all of this.
This was the house where I was babysat, so it’s a passage of time. Yesterday, I visited the attic for the first time ever, it had been closed off for 50 years before this cleanup, and it had little to recommend it and everything to recommend it gets demolished before it falls in. The basement, which I only knew as the home of a rather aggressive and incontinent large dog from my childhood was similarly abandoned. The building next door was the family business, once the third oldest auto dealership in the country, so it’s trying for all the relatives who did their first job there cleaning out the parts room, or moving cars around the lot. And we’re all kind of more exhausted by this 18-month process, than glad to move forward.
Sometime this fall, the house and the dealership are going to be leveled, and two blocks next the first stop light in town are going start looking like every other small town along the interstate. The relatives will return to where their lives have led them, and life will continue. But they certainly won’t be able to go home.
The current deck of coordinate cards:
AUTHOR
WRITER
POET
PLAYWRIGHT
BOOK
WORK
POEM
PLAY
SCIENTIST
CHEMIST
PHYSICIST
BIOLOGIST
SCIENTIFIC PRINCIPLE
INSTRUMENT
PROCESS
THEORY
MACHINE
TECHNIQUE
LOCATION
RIVER
LAKE
ISLAND
BORDER
POLITY
AREA
NATION
COUNTRY
CITY
AGREEMENT
POLICY
LAW
STUDY
FIELD
DISCIPLINE
PHILOSOPHER
THINKER
SOCIAL SCIENTIST
STATESMAN
POLITICIAN
LEGISLATOR
WORLD LEADER
MOVEMENT
CONFLICT
WAR
EXPLORER
PEOPLE
RELIGIOUS FIGURE
DOCUMENT
ORGANIZATION
PUBLICATION
PLAN
ARTWORK
PIECE
MASTERPIECE
MAGNUM OPUS
PRACTICE
POLICY
EPIC
SERIES
COMPOSITION
BIOGRAPHY
LEGENDARY FIGURE
14th CENTURY / 15th CENTURY
16th CENTURY / 17th CENTURY
18th CENTURY
19th CENTURY
20th CENTURY
21st CENTURY
CURRENT
PRESENT-DAY
ANCIENT
PREHISTORIC
MODERN
MEDIEVAL
RENAISSANCE
1960s
1970s
1980s
1990s
2000s
2010s
AMERICAN
NORTH AMERICAN
CENTRAL AMERICAN
SOUTH AMERICAN
SOUTHERN
NORTHERN
WESTERN
EASTERN
EUROPEAN
AFRICAN
ASIAN
AUSTRALIAN
BRITISH
ENGLISH
FRENCH
GERMAN
SPANISH
RUSSIAN
CHINESE
JAPANESE
ITALIAN
GREEK
ROMAN
SCANDINAVIAN
INDIAN
EGYPTIAN
CARIBBEAN
OCEANIC
ATLANTIC
PACIFIC
CENTRAL
COASTAL
INDIGENOUS