Before COVID hit, I had purchased a large stack of books intending them to be prizes for tournaments. Since I can't get rid of them until we're back to face-to-face touranments, I thought I'd use them to explain some principles for quiz bowl study and improvement. First up, The National Geographic Guide to National Parks of the United States.
This is a fairly standard tour guide or coffee table book, which I rescued from the bargain bin at the local chain bookstore. It's not a scholarly publication, but if I'm going to write questions that need to be answered by people who are not geographic experts I'm fine with that. What we're looking to use this for writing is middle school, high school, and maybe pub quiz. It's a subcategory within Geography (Travel & Tourism) which people are likely to have some experience, even if they don't cover it in school, and it has enough threads in other categories to manage to fit into General Knowledge or Miscellaneous category slots.
What I do with books like this that I find is I try to write as much as I can out of them. I call this extraction of the book. I create questions, notes, clues, anything I can to turn the knowledge in the book into content for quiz bowl. At minimum I want to write enough questions from this that were I to submit them, I'd break even on the purchase of the book. I do this for X reasons:
- To familiarize myself with the contents of the book, use the convert the knowledge to into memory and test the memory by putting all the details I can into questions.
- To write questions that can be used by others.
- To figure out what are the associated types of information which will be used by other writers when they write questions in the same categor(y/ies) as found in the book.
For this experiment, rather than start churning page by page, I opened to a random page, read the article or studied the map there, and began taking notes and adding details to form a question. After I’ve finished with a few questions, I start looking at which clues I chose to use, and I break out types of clues that are similar. So here's what resulted after about ninety minutes of reading and notetaking, and then settling upon six questions to write.
(and yes I know every part A answer is a national park. I’m not necessarily writing these questions for tournament usage, first they must be used to improve my memory.)
1
The Kapapala Forest Reserve is not part of this national park despite it lying on the slopes of Mauna Loa west of the Mokuaweoweo caldera.
A. Name this national park named for its state and main feature.
answer: Hawai'i Volcanoes
B. Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park contains Mauna Loa and this other volcano whose 2018 eruption destroyed the Puna Geothermal Venture, which provided a quarter of the island's electricity.
answer: Kilauea
C. Haleakala National Park on this island contains a location near its namesake volcano where according to legend this god ensnared the Sun.
answer: Maui
2
One unit of this national park is surrounded by Buffalo Gap National Grassland, while its South Unit is surrounded by the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.
A. Name this national park in South Dakota.
answer: Badlands National Park
B. Stronghold Table in Badlands National Park was the site of the last meeting of this 1890 religious movement promoted by Wovoka.
answer: Ghost Dance movement
C. An attempt at a Ghost Dance occurred during this massacre which began when US cavalry attempted to disarm the Lakota near a namesake creek.
answer: Wounded Knee
3
Name these national parks in Florida:
A. The Tamiami Trail marks the northern boundary of this National Park containing wetlands surrounding the outflow of Lake Okeechobee.
answer: Everglades National Park
B. The islands on which this National Park lies were named by Ponce de Leon for their abundance of sea turtles, the adjective in its name refers to its lack of fresh water.
answer: Dry Tortugas National Park
C. Containing the southermost of the Atlantic barrier islands, this national park covers the shore and reefs north of Miami in its namesake bay.
answer: Biscayne National Park
4
From the Top of The Cross one has a panoramic view of the Big Room and the Crystal Spring Dome, this park's largest stalagmite.
A. Name this national park in New Mexico, which Will Rogers referred to this national park as the "Grand Canyon with a roof".
answer: Carlsbad Caverns National Park
B. Carlsbad Caverns lies beneath this desert, which shares its name with the Mexican state that borders New Mexico and Texas.
answer: Chihuahan Desert
C. Cyclones of this animal leave their namesake cave in the caverns at dusk to feed.
answer: bats
5
Ferries connect this national park with Houghton, Michigan and Grand Portage, Minnesota.
A. Name this national park
answer: Isle Royale National Park
B. Isle Royale lies a few miles south of the U.S.-Canadian border in this Great Lake.
answer: Lake Superior
C. A colony of these predators crossed the frozen Lake Superior in the 1940's and prey on the islands moose population.
answer: gray wolf
6
Fontana Dam creates Fontana Lake which is part of the southern border of this national park.
A. Name this national park in Tennessee.
answer: Great Smoky Mountains National Park
B. This road named for the mountains of the area connects Great Smoky Mountains' with Virginia's Shenandoah National Park.
answer: Blue Ridge Parkway
C. This mountain, the highest point in Tennessee and along the Appalachian Trail, lies in Great Smoky Mountains.
answer: Clingmans Dome
The question is: What are the types of clues I chose, and how does that selection inform us?
Let's try and classify the clues that are included in the question.
Attractions, sights (Stronghold Table, Big Room, Bat Cave, Crystal Spring Dome, stalagmites)
Highest peak (Mauna Loa, Clingmans Dome)
Waterways within and bordering (Fontana Lake, Lake Superior, Lake Okeechobee)
Political geography
The state(s) where it lies (every question practically used this)
The nearby cities (Houghton, Miami, Grand Portage)
The borders of the park (Tamiami Trail, Canadian-US border, Pine Ridge)
Trails and entry points (Blue Ridge Parkway, Tamiami Trail, Appalachian Trail)
Anecdotes (Will Rogers, Ponce de Leon, an unused note about Samuel Mudd)
Ecology of the park (bats, gray wolf, sea turtles)
Geology of the park (Atlantic barrier islands, caldera, geysers in a failed attempt to write about Yellowstone)
Historical events and figures (Ponce de Leon, Wounded Knee, Ghost Dance)
Mythology (Maui)
If we look at these groups, we can sort of see where types of clues will appear, and what sort of things are used for answers. Because every national park is in a state (or territory) that geography clue is necessary to know but not likely to be an early clue. It allows the writer to point to the answer with a common clue, but not necessarily a unique clue. Those help you organize your knowledge of national parks when you have them all committed to memory. They are also easy to recall the association, because we naturally organize our knowledge into "Where is it? What state?" Things like attractions, special borders of the park, or nearby cities are more distinctive and unique, but aren't in themselves very interesting if you only know them as names, those are going to be mid-level clues for writers who never visited there. But things like the anecdotes, or the geology, or the ecology, or history or mythology are unique to that national park, and the category itself isn't likely to be shared with other national parks. That makes them ideal early clues.
Now this process is using your own powers of observation as a proxy for all writers, but that's not a bad first guess. What you may find interesting might not be what everyone finds interesting and worthy of note, but you're going to hit most of the high notes. Humans for the most part, find the same things interesting, just some people find more things interesting that just that base. And as you acquire game experience, you're going to start noticing patterns in questions, improving your ability to scan texts, and find more things interesting.
Now as you're scanning the rest of the book for questions or knowledge, you can use your previous writing to inform your learning. When you find something uniquely identifying, distinctive, detailed, interesting, or in a rare class of information (there aren't calderas everywhere, or mythological explanations of all places), you know that this is comething that could be an early clue which you can either write about, or profit from when someone else writes about it. If there is a common class of information that easily associates or organizes all the knowledge in the text, it will be a late clue (This guide is split into geographic sections, so which state a park is in matters to organize the knowledge.) You need it to give a structure to your knowledge so you can put things in place when other clues guide you. And you can use that knowledge of what clues go where to improve your writing, as you progress through the book. That's why I say extract all you can. It's a virtuous cycle where your observation improves your writing, which improves your retention, which improves your observation.
This method does not guarantee mastery of the material. You're taking in a lot of knowledge and associations of knowledge, you may confuse similar information on different pages. That's why that step of writing what you have learned into questions is important, in writing and self-editing your questions you will see where you've introduced ambiguity (like when you get to the parts in the book about Crater Lake’s caldera, or Lassen Volcanic), vague non-clues, or misleading phrasing into your questions, giving you the ability to clarify earlier questions and increase your recall of facts.
This creates more knowledge than is testable in competition questions. By doing this writing, you are creating more questions than you will need to fulfill packet requirements for a subcategory. Subcategories have natural rates of consumption, as dictated by subject distributions. This technique accepts that if find ten good questions in a book, all in one subcategory, and polish them to be good enough to submit, the questions will not be consumed by the next tournament, or even by this year's tournaments. I can be at peace with the waiting, though, because other people will be also writing questions and I can pick up points on questions where the clues I extracted and their questions intersect. Tomorrow's questions are both written and answered by today's effort.
Next week: we'll take apart the next book in the pile.
tl;dr
Take a reference, and extract all the information you can.
As you go start taking notes and expanding notes into questions.
When you've got a few questions written, and before you are done with the text, figure out what patterns of clues you are selecting.
Early clues: Uniquely identifying, distinctive, interesting, detailed, or from a rare class of information.
Late clues: Easily and readily associated with the answer. Of a property that is present in many answers in that category.
Late clues and last clues are not necessarily easy, they may not even uniquely identifying individually, but the association they make with the answer is easy to recall.
Keep working through the text, and keep writing questions from it, and improving the questions you have written.
Use your polished questions from this process to supply later packet submissions.