Unlike most people who seem to pontificate on this issue, I actually don't have much of a problem with the clock, and in fact would like it to stay. I think the combination of the NAQT short-question format, powers, and the clock actually work well together create a really unique and fun experience. Some of the few times I've achieved Csíkszentmihályi-style flow in quizbowl is playing SCT or ICT questions on the clock, really fast, against good teams (ex. against, but not limited to, Yale this weekend); as someone whose only other way to do this is pipetting, I appreciate the opportunity twice a year. Furthermore, I think the abandonment of the clock-killing neg and the increase in time for the halves pretty much corrects all the flaws I saw in the system before, where the clock added an excessive amount of gimmickry.
However, I think the clock (and relatedly, short questions) add(s) some unique challenges from the position of a writer and editor. Any suboptimalities in a question are magnified severalfold when they're being read at high speed, with two good teams, and with fewer characters to work with. I think this means that you have to have an extra level of empathy with the player, who is forced to perform the usual quizbowl cognitive gymnastics of hearing complex pieces of information, parsing them, recalling their associations, etc at what could be several times normal speed. This, to me, means at least two things:
1. There are certain types of answerlines and clues that do not work at higher speed. There are a few categories of this:
-Things like rhythm and score clues in music questions are much harder to parse.
-Computational bonuses are much more difficult when the moderator can't slow down. I know the formula C =\frac{\kappa \epsilon _{0}A}{d}, as does anyone who's taken AP Physics, but I couldn't even hear that the question wanted to double the linear dimension of the plate; in an ACF-type setting, if the question were well written, it would tell the moderator to slow down.
-That style of question that Yaphe loves so much where you common link a bunch of books based on a shared word in the title becomes much more aggravating and trivial-sounding than it already is. You really shouldn't do this anyway, for reasons bashed out elsewhere, but it's doubly frustrating in this setting.
2. There needs to be even tighter editing of pronouns and referents (these are things that should also happen in ACF questions).
-Using specific pronouns is important. Calling "clear and present danger" a "test" then a "concept" is unnecessarily confusing; I wanted to buzz on "imminent lawless action" with something like "restrictions on free speech" because it followed the word "concept". Had you instead used the word "test" throughout, this would have been more fair. There are fewer clues, and they are read to you faster, so confusions like this become magnified.
-The order of a given sentence becomes much more important when there are more buzzer races and everyone's on edge. My go-to example for this set will be the [otherwise excellent] tossup on Uruk, whose leadin I will reproduce here:
Consider the beginning of that second sentence while playing; I've heard the word Enmerkar (who I knew during play was Lugulbanda's predecessor), but I don't know what it relates to. The sentence could finish "Enmerkar founded this city", "Enmerkar attacked this city", "Enmerkar had sex with every woman in this city", etc, etc, but I've already heard the nucleus of that clue without knowing what it wants. That question would be better if the sentence went "The legendary founder of this city was Enmerkar", or even "The legendary founder of this city had several correspondences with the "Lord of Aratta" in a text that contains an account of the confusion of tongues; that founder was Enmerkar". It really breaks the flow of the game when you have to wait for the necessary part of the clue, and the adage that you should get the pronoun out as early as possible applies to each clue in isolation, not just the first one.2015 SCT wrote:A text that recounts a series of diplomatic exchanges between a king of this city and the "Lord of Aratta" contains an account of the "{confusion of tongues}." Enmerkar was the legendary founder of this city,
If there are other things people think are worth pointing out, I would love to hear them.
Note that there are also things outside the purview of editors that are magnified by the clock that cannot be changed. For example, in the aldol condensation tossup this weekend, I heard clue in the leadin as the "Henner reaction" rather than the "Henry reaction"; that's not the question's fault, so I have no complaint about it. But saying that moderators will mispronounce things is no reason to not improve practices in the ways I've outlined above.