ACF Regs 2021: quick thoughts on critical practices

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Susan
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ACF Regs 2021: quick thoughts on critical practices

Post by Susan »

In the 2021 ACF Regs discussion thread...
jaimiec wrote: Mon Feb 01, 2021 8:51 pmIn addition to players asking editors about questions, we also wanted to give editors a chance to shout out some of their favorite submissions! We were blown away by the creativity and range of the questions submitted, and encourage teams who enjoyed submitting packets to this tournament to get involved with writing and editing in their quizbowl community.
Belatedly, I wanted to say what a brilliant idea I thought this was--kudos to whoever came up with it. I hope that future editors of packet-sub tournaments will continue this practice. Here's a few reasons why I think it's really valuable (in roughly ascending order of importance):
  • For packet-sub tournaments that receive tons of submitted packets, like Fall and Regs, writers can be frustrated by the fate of their questions--many go unused (due to repeats or other constraints involved in producing a finitely large set) and still others can be significantly changed from their original form. Having a way for editors to quickly highlights some of the questions they particularly enjoyed in a set provides some positive feedback to counterbalance the implicit negative feedback of having writers' questions cut or drastically edited.
  • As Jaimie said explicitly in her message, publicly highlighting good questions is a way to encourage their writers to take on a bigger writing and editing role in the community. I've been part of quite a few conversations about how to bring more writers into the fold over the years, some of which have explicitly focused on how to bring in more writers from groups underrepresented in the community. (Writer/editor diversity is a particularly big concern given the way that writing teams have often been put together, with people drawing from their friends/networks and folks who were already "known quantities" as writers and editors.) People have tried some different approaches to address this, but reaching out to people based on their submissions for packet-sub tournaments is a method that has, I think, been underutilized. I'd love to see the community do more of it--and build to on it (say, with private outreach to the teams/players who wrote the great questions--which perhaps the Regs team is doing in this case as well).
  • Finally, I think this approach cuts against some of the worst aspects of quizbowl's culture of critique. The question of how to provide effective and helpful criticism of other people's writing is a topic that I find personally and professionally fascinating (for those who don't know me, I run a grants/research development office at a small liberal arts college, so critique is a huge part of my professional life). Throughout my involvement with the quizbowl community, I've been struck by how vituperative (and, maybe more to the point, unhelpful) post-tournament critiques have often been. They've been bad in fairly standard ways, so far as I can tell--you get critics who seem unable to distinguish between a question that is bad on the merits and one that doesn't have major technical flaws but takes a different approach than the critic would have, you get unsystematic lists of nitpicks that offer no clear guidance for improvement, and you have the general kittens-sharpening-their-claws type of hyperdramatic critique that's also very common in grad seminars. Perhaps most concerningly, it's often seemed like folks had a real reluctance to praise questions that were actually good--and for me, this was crystallized in a comment in a long-ago discussion where a player mentioned that they felt much more confident in critiquing questions than praising good ones (because they weren't sufficiently confident in their knowledge to offer that praise). This was a comment I read quite a while ago--but I've returned to it a lot in thinking about critique in quizbowl (and beyond!) because I don't think it's particular to this player; I think this mindset has characterized a ton of the critical posts I've read on this site (even if most of their authors haven't been candid or self-aware enough to cop to why they're posting like they're posting). In this context, the ACF Regs editors' choice to publicly praise questions they liked seemed like a really positive move to me, and I hope it's a sign that we're moving towards a more balanced, and hopefully a more effective, culture of critique in quizbowl.
Susan
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Re: ACF Regs 2021: quick thoughts on critical practices

Post by Susan »

And a quick follow-up, since I always worry that comments like this are going to be misread as "being nice is important!"--I've never considered myself an unusually kind or gentle critic, but I think I've come around to being a fairly pragmatic one (and this is a big difference from the retrospectively embarrassing critiques I provided of plenty of quizbowl sets!). In my day-to-day, I have to balance wanting to provide critique that will improve a proposal with needing to present that critique so that the proposal's author will be receptive to what I say and will want to work with me. Some of that's in how I present the critique, but some of it involves extending some generosity and empathy to the writer--thinking about why they wrote their piece the way they did, what their goals seem to have been, and how to bring those goals into alignment with what they need to do to be successful. (For a lot of these thoughts about generosity and thinking with, rather than against people, I'm indebted to Kathleen Fitzpatrick's recent book Generous Thinking: The University and the Common Good, an open-access draft manuscript of which can be found here.)
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caroline
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Re: ACF Regs 2021: quick thoughts on critical practices

Post by caroline »

This is a really good thread, and I'm glad Susan brought up this topic! I also want to point out that this is good practice in general, not just with packet sub tournaments, though I do think it is especially important for packet sub tournaments since people are taking the time to write their submissions simply to enter a tournament, often without much feedback or guidance compared to the help you'd get as a writer on a non-submission set.

In general, I'd be quite happy if more people spent their time on discussion forums mentioning what they liked about a set, not just its faults. It is important because 1. it is a nice thing to do, it makes people feel better and rewarded for the immense amount of effort it takes to write a good and interesting question and it makes quizbowl a more positive place, but also 2. it helps you improve a lot as a writer by capitalizing on your strengths and knowing what you're doing correctly so you can keep doing them, not just what you're doing wrong.

[EDIT] Also, this advice is mostly about the process of creation rather than feedback given afterwards (and is also about user interface design and not quizbowl writing), but Amy Ko's How to be critical is an insightful read that has informed how I approach critique, particularly as an editor.
Caroline Mao • 毛宇晨 [they/she]
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Cheynem
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Re: ACF Regs 2021: quick thoughts on critical practices

Post by Cheynem »

One of the challenges many players of tournaments have in giving good, specific, and even positive feedback relates to the way most players receive the questions--in very incomplete form linked to events triggering great emotions. It's easy to remember the questions that "caused" someone to lose a game or make a frustrating neg, and it can also be easy to rather lazily think of the "great questions" that were only great because you powered them or they helped you win a game. As a player, I also think of many instances in which "I only heard two clues in this question, but they seemed good/bad," and then my mind changing completely when I saw the complete question. Or seeing a question on paper, I realize that my frustration was largely due to me mishearing or a moderator error or something. In other words, players trying to give question feedback would, in most cases, be like someone reviewing a book they didn't completely read (hmm...so a grad seminar???). That's not necessarily an excuse for bad feedback--if a question set has been posted or released, ideally people would look through the sets and try to organize their thoughts before posting, but just an explanation that it's easier to do "from the hip" quick takes.

That's why, as Susan said in the first post, it's very nice that editors, especially in packet submission tournaments, start the conversation by highlighting questions they particularly liked. Editors can see the questions in their complete and full form, and are not bogged down by thinking about negging or powering so and so question--they theoretically present a more objective point of view. And while for a non-packet submission tournament, bragging about one's questions may seem gauche, it's very nice for a packet submission tournament, for the reasons Susan and Caroline have explained. What I've seen sometimes for non packet submission tournaments is editors trying to steer the conversation to certain points, asking "What did people think about the geography in this tournament? We tried to highlight more human geography," or other things in this vein. I think the editors can do a lot to set the tone for productive (and positive) criticism in tournament threads and I'm glad editors like the Regs editors did that.
Mike Cheyne
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