ACF Regionals 2013 Literature and Arts Discussion
Posted: Mon Feb 25, 2013 5:40 pm
I edited the Literature, Music, and Misc. Auditory Arts for this tournament, and split editing duties with Chris Ray on the Misc. Visual Arts.
I would be remiss if I did not thank both Chris Ray himself for his work as head editor and Auroni Gupta for freelancing a packet, which provided much helpful material for replacement questions.
I wanted to say a few words on the philosophical approach I took in my editing, to provide context for discussion:
Literature tossups were 7-8 lines long. For all tossups on individual novels or plays, the first 3 or so lines were dedicated to incidents that could be clued purely descriptively, without reference to character names. The remaining 4-5 lines were all dedicated to major plot events and characters, with an effort to cover a lot of ground. The majority of submitted tossups did not conform to these standards (either by containing impossible lead-ins, no lead-in-level material whatsoever, or a paucity of middle clues) and were therefore heavily rewritten. (I apologize if any writers were upset by the degree to which their submissions were rewritten to fit these rather stringent criteria, but I hope your playing experience was improved by this.)
Many author tossups also conformed to this model, except describing two or three works instead of only one. However, I also kept some author tossups that used the "shallow description of many works" model, in cases where these obscure works seemed interesting enough or important enough to deserve mention. Titles were generally not dropped immediately, though title-drops were given for all works described in a tossup.
I think I managed to keep all bonuses in my categories under two lines, except for one. Hard parts of literature bonuses attempted to reward knowledge not only of obscure works but also of the contents of famous works. I tended to choose plot and interpretively significant imagery over minor character names, since I find the names of minor characters extremely difficult to remember and often quite incidental to an understanding of the work.
There were a lot of tossups in this tournament on individual characters. I like tossups like these and wrote some myself, but this mostly reflects the extreme volume of submissions of tossup of this kind. To prevent them from entirely overwhelming the distribution, I had to convert some of them back into tossups on the works. As it stands, I think the proportion of these is a little too high.
To ensure good cluing, I read every single work that was individually tossed up in the literature distribution. I did this to try to make sure that the lead-in clues were both memorable enough to deserve their status, and were described with enough specificity and clarity to be as buzzable as possible; and to make sure I had a firm grasp of what are the important points for each work. (I was disturbed to find that a high proportion of submitted lit tossups misreported basic plot details.) I chose answer-lines based on what I thought would make a balanced and diverse and subdistribution, rather than trying to learn more by favoring works that I had not read or giving myself an easier workload by favoring works that I had read.
In the music questions, I attempted to consistently reward "real knowledge" using a broad definition of "real knowledge" that includes music theory, history, musicological study, and historically significant performances/recordings, and by focusing on core repertoire and basic concepts.
Since I assume that a single-digit number of people in the field possess music theory knowledge, and almost none of these people is regularly performing deep analysis of scores, I avoided using theoretical language to describe minor features of works (since the language barrier of music theory and the obscurity barrier of the feature's being minor create a sort of double barrier). Thus, the analytical/score clues in this tournament are quite literally the translation of the most famous and recognizable moments from pieces into technical terms. If I misjudged this, and this led to massive buzzer races early in questions, let me know. (Though I doubt this was the case.) But my hope was that this would strike a balance between "real" and accessible.
The one distributional quirk in the music is that an extremely high proportion of you submitted tossups on 20th century Russian composers (Skryabin in particular). I cut many of these questions after a while so as not to throw the distributional balance off, but there are still more of these than I would have liked.
So, if you have any feedback, whether it be praise or condemnation of individual questions that you think were particularly well or poorly executed, a Gioia-esque methodological critique of my approach, or whatever, I am happy to engage. And I hope to do more editing work like this in future.
I would be remiss if I did not thank both Chris Ray himself for his work as head editor and Auroni Gupta for freelancing a packet, which provided much helpful material for replacement questions.
I wanted to say a few words on the philosophical approach I took in my editing, to provide context for discussion:
Literature tossups were 7-8 lines long. For all tossups on individual novels or plays, the first 3 or so lines were dedicated to incidents that could be clued purely descriptively, without reference to character names. The remaining 4-5 lines were all dedicated to major plot events and characters, with an effort to cover a lot of ground. The majority of submitted tossups did not conform to these standards (either by containing impossible lead-ins, no lead-in-level material whatsoever, or a paucity of middle clues) and were therefore heavily rewritten. (I apologize if any writers were upset by the degree to which their submissions were rewritten to fit these rather stringent criteria, but I hope your playing experience was improved by this.)
Many author tossups also conformed to this model, except describing two or three works instead of only one. However, I also kept some author tossups that used the "shallow description of many works" model, in cases where these obscure works seemed interesting enough or important enough to deserve mention. Titles were generally not dropped immediately, though title-drops were given for all works described in a tossup.
I think I managed to keep all bonuses in my categories under two lines, except for one. Hard parts of literature bonuses attempted to reward knowledge not only of obscure works but also of the contents of famous works. I tended to choose plot and interpretively significant imagery over minor character names, since I find the names of minor characters extremely difficult to remember and often quite incidental to an understanding of the work.
There were a lot of tossups in this tournament on individual characters. I like tossups like these and wrote some myself, but this mostly reflects the extreme volume of submissions of tossup of this kind. To prevent them from entirely overwhelming the distribution, I had to convert some of them back into tossups on the works. As it stands, I think the proportion of these is a little too high.
To ensure good cluing, I read every single work that was individually tossed up in the literature distribution. I did this to try to make sure that the lead-in clues were both memorable enough to deserve their status, and were described with enough specificity and clarity to be as buzzable as possible; and to make sure I had a firm grasp of what are the important points for each work. (I was disturbed to find that a high proportion of submitted lit tossups misreported basic plot details.) I chose answer-lines based on what I thought would make a balanced and diverse and subdistribution, rather than trying to learn more by favoring works that I had not read or giving myself an easier workload by favoring works that I had read.
In the music questions, I attempted to consistently reward "real knowledge" using a broad definition of "real knowledge" that includes music theory, history, musicological study, and historically significant performances/recordings, and by focusing on core repertoire and basic concepts.
Since I assume that a single-digit number of people in the field possess music theory knowledge, and almost none of these people is regularly performing deep analysis of scores, I avoided using theoretical language to describe minor features of works (since the language barrier of music theory and the obscurity barrier of the feature's being minor create a sort of double barrier). Thus, the analytical/score clues in this tournament are quite literally the translation of the most famous and recognizable moments from pieces into technical terms. If I misjudged this, and this led to massive buzzer races early in questions, let me know. (Though I doubt this was the case.) But my hope was that this would strike a balance between "real" and accessible.
The one distributional quirk in the music is that an extremely high proportion of you submitted tossups on 20th century Russian composers (Skryabin in particular). I cut many of these questions after a while so as not to throw the distributional balance off, but there are still more of these than I would have liked.
So, if you have any feedback, whether it be praise or condemnation of individual questions that you think were particularly well or poorly executed, a Gioia-esque methodological critique of my approach, or whatever, I am happy to engage. And I hope to do more editing work like this in future.