Editors, please TRIM your bonuses

Elaborate on the merits of specific tournaments or have general theoretical discussion here.
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touchpack
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Editors, please TRIM your bonuses

Post by touchpack »

The last two tournaments I have played were Chicago Open 2022 and CMST. Both of them were great tournaments, and I had a blast playing them. However, both tournaments, at times, greatly annoyed me with their lack of attention or care towards bonus length. It is generally agreed upon by the quizbowl community that tossups should be strictly length-controlled--gone are the days of questions that drone on for 9, 10, or even more lines with no good reason to do so. While I don't think bonuses should be as strictly controlled as tossups, they should be at least somewhat controlled. The worst example of this I've witnessed recently was a CMST bonus that had a full two sentences before the "For 10 points each"--don't do this! Overly long bonuses do the following:

1) Waste the moderator's time having to read more words
2) Waste the player's time having to listen to more words
3) Encourage players to interrupt bonuses to get on with the game, which can cause tragedy when a bonus takes a completely unexpected left turn after its first sentence (this happened to me at CMST).

In my opinion, a good way to accomplish this is to have a dedicated stage of editing for bonus trimming. While editors should be conscientious of bonus length through all steps of the writing process, it's very helpful near the end to have a new set of eyes (like the head editor or a proofreader) mark bonuses that are too long and require the subject editor to trim them. I have done dedicated bonus trimming for every NAQT set I've edited in the past couple years, and it makes an enormous difference.
myself, back in August wrote:I very strongly agree with this, especially with bonus length. 820 characters as the mean length is very, very, very, very, very, very long. While ICT is a very different tournament from CO, at the Division 1 ICT this year the average bonus length ranged from 538-568 characters, depending on the packet, and the VERY LONGEST bonus in the entire set was 652 characters. The bonuses in this set could have been significantly shorter, probably saving a full hour of time at the tournament (possibly even longer?).
One rule that I think almost every bonus should follow: once you have given enough clues that your bonus part will play at its intended difficulty (easy, medium, or hard), STOP the bonus part there. To use an extreme hypothetical example, if you've already said "This author wrote Moby Dick", do NOT drone on for another 3 lines afterward about Melville's poetry. I don't care what your bonus "theme" is, you can write this in a shorter, less annoying way that doesn't ruin the natural flow of gameplay and encourage players to interrupt.
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Re: Editors, please TRIM your bonuses

Post by Adventure Temple Trail »

Co-sign. Writing Yaphe-style parts where appropriate is a key skill for excellent question writing. You can always return to the material you cut in some future writing project :grin:

In general, I'd contend that for non-NAQT college sets, "a bonus at a particular tournament should not have more lines of clue than a tossup at that tournament" is a good rule to stick to.
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Re: Editors, please TRIM your bonuses

Post by Mike Bentley »

I personally find line-based restrictions somewhat annoying to implement. I'm a bigger fan of a hard cap on character count. This gives you some flexibility to make one part longer when it needs to be while trimming from other parts of the bonus.
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Re: Editors, please TRIM your bonuses

Post by Cheynem »

I'm actually kind of surprised that we stringently put in line caps on tossups, when arguably many times not every line is even read, but not character/line caps on bonuses, which has the potential of having every line or word being read.

What I do for the categories I edit in NAQT is I shoot for a certain character limit. I'm not super stringent, so we can go a few characters over here and there, but I get submissions sometimes that are like 100 characters over where I like to be, and I start cutting things down. Remind me when I have more time and I'll make a thread about how to be pithier in writing bonuses.
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Re: Editors, please TRIM your bonuses

Post by jmarvin_ »

I wanted to say some things about why I disagree with the spirit of this post and the philosophy behind it, even as I don't disagree with its practical proposals in all but rare cases. I understand that many of the things this post will say are going to be controversial and likely quite unpopular, but I hope at least it will give other writers and editors something to think about. I want to be clear here at the start to be sure that this isn't taken merely as a defense of my editorial decisions with CMST II, even as I'll say a few things on that front here before moving to the general point. Likewise, I want to be explicit that I'm most thankful for the praise in Billy's post, and don't want any of the below to muddy that; it really means a lot to know I could show him and others a good time, and I have nothing but gratitude for being so recognized even as I disagree with some of the principles behind his respectful and overall productive critique.

As a matter of fact, I did do a pass on every question outside of science to trim unnecessary wording (truth be told, the other editors made some last-second changes after I did this trimming pass, so there may have been things I didn't have the chance to catch in the version you heard). We enforced a length limit of 8 total lines (adding two half-lines from different parts into 1 line for this count) with only a few deliberate exceptions that wouldn't otherwise work without going a few words over; this was shorter than most tossups, which were controlled more strictly by word-count as line-count can be highly distorted by bad luck. The one bonus I can remember leaving two sentences before "for 10 points each" was a deliberate decision, as I honestly don't see any intrinsic problem with this in any respect, since both sentences were quite short and it would've only lengthened the question to merge them into one compound sentence. I many times converted wordy bonus parts (a number of which written by a previous version of myself!) into "Yaphe"-style parts, and when this wasn't done, it was deliberate (excepting of course that I certainly mistakenly missed opportunities to do this that I wouldn't/couldn't now justify). I disagree with the idea that any of the decisions about additional materials in bonuses "waste" the moderators'/players' time, and every time I consciously chose to leave a bonus longer than it "needed to be" according to certain ideals it was in service of differing principles I'm about to enumerate (barring mistakes, of course). I'll also add that interrupting bonuses is an unnecessary risk the player takes in any tournament - one I've rightfully gotten lambasted for a number of times - and I don't think editors should be blamed for this when there isn't a large-scale problem at play. We managed to run our mirror of the tournament efficiently and on a good timeline, finishing 9 rounds (almost 10 rounds' worth of questions, per 20/20) at a healthy hour, and would've finished finals at an agreeable time too were it not for protests. Multiple players took the time to comment in praise of this to myself and others, and I think it should be clear from those remarks that the set was not systematically over-long in a practically problematic way, as some past sets have been. Were that not the case, I think such a problem would outweigh everything I'm about to discuss.

In any case, I'll move on to sketching some general points about question/bonus length and why I personally disagree with the motivations of the original post of this thread:

Brevity is not an intrinsic good

While it may be true that shorter questions are usually better, it would be a mistake to think this is because "shorter" is itself a kind of "better" in the domain of quizbowl questions. Shorter questions are better when some of the length is altogether unnecessary, and the same contents can be expressed in fewer syllables without sacrificing anything meaningful, but this is because length causes practical problems, not because concision is an intrinsic good. Trimming, as specifically targetted to the exclusion of the other concerns of editing, is a necessary evil, a sort of sacrifice that must be done to keep the game playable. There are in fact countervailing benefits which more length may sometimes afford the writer/editor, such that what seems to be "excess" length in terms of what knowledge is rewarded may not be "unnecessary" in the absolute, as the "excess" material serves some other purpose. For example, one could have aesthetic reasons to phrase a sentence in more words than it "needs;" I grant that this is almost never justified over and above the practical concerns regarding question length, and that most of the time one could argue for a question to be kept longer for aesthetic reasons there are other concerns at play that are the real difference-makers (like parseability at game speed or nailing things down). There are more salient potential boons to be gained from longer questions, though, which I'll try to point to below.

Sometimes the "extra" material in easy parts is actually there in service of the hard/medium parts

This is the most obvious point to be made, and as far as I'm aware every quizbowl set I've played in my post-high-school career did this at some point. Many hard and medium parts in bonuses need a bit more than a normal two lines to get to the optimal difficulty calibration, even with everything carefully trimmed. As I and a number of other editors have realized, one can accomplish this without writing any unusually long bonus parts by simply including some of the extra information in the easier parts in a way that makes aesthetic and gameplay sense. Without altering the flow of the game, a normal length easy part can include information much harder than the most important clues toward its easy conversion in order to improve the flow of the harder parts while facilitating their difficulty through more context. This happens so frequently that I would be surprised to hear anyone object to it. That doesn't mean that one shouldn't still be attentive to "signposting" easy parts, as will be discussed below as well, but I've heard and seen questions by good editors who struck this balance with ease.

Questions should be written to be studied, not just to be played

The final arbiter of how a question is composed should be how it plays in tournament, certainly. Nevertheless, I don't think this means that there aren't other purposes toward which one can and should write, if possible to do so without harming the playability. This is evident from a consideration of the reality of our game: people learn, study, and write future sets by consulting previous ones, and we should be writing our sets with an eye to this as well. It is my contention, and one that I tried to exemplify with my work on CMST II, that there are often times where longer phrasing does not negatively affect the way the question plays, but does benefit the future reader in their studying or writing endeavors. The quizbowl writer/editor, if sufficiently thoughtful, has the opportunity to not only test knowledge in a game but to communicate why that knowledge is important, relevant, interesting, and so on, both in the game but more importantly after it. A slightly longer phrasing of a clue can make future reader's lives much easier and more interesting by pointing study and writing-research in the right directions, making sense of things that aren't clear without prior knowledge, and so forth. Again, to be clear, this is only ever justified if length is already healthily controlled overall and if such decisions do not negatively affect the questions in the heat of a game. I think it's often worth the few extra seconds in a day, short enough as to have a negligible effect on the pace of a tournament, to enrich the future of quizbowl and its players. This applies as well to sneaking in things that merit future inclusion in quizbowl even as they would otherwise be impossible to ask about under the current metagame, although there's usually a better way to do so. I fundamentally disagree with the idea that this is a "waste" of anyone's time, as in the long run such things can pan out into better experiences for us all. The points below are meant to reinforce that claim as well.

Teams who are largely playing for easy parts deserve substantial content

"Yaphe-style," minimalist easy parts almost without exception would be better for the experiences of strong players, certainly, but the majority of players (and almost all would-be new players!) are not numbered among this class. Just as we as a community value keeping the game from being too "dry," and enjoy injecting humor, rigor, and curiosities into our harder questions, we should be attentive to giving those experiences to less experienced players as well. All the more potentially demoralizing than only being able to convert easy parts is being in that position when the large portion of them are trivial and curt, while the mediums and hards are clearly more interesting and pleasant, but nevertheless out of reach. No, this does not mean one should add lines about Melville's poetry to a question asking for the author of Moby Dick just for this purpose, to use the above example. But it does mean that a more interesting way of asking "who wrote Moby Dick" may be better even if it costs a few additional seconds, for the sake of this sort of player. Easy parts should feel rewarding and stimulating, especially to newer or weaker teams, even if powerhouse players derive little therefrom. There is of course the concern of signposting easy parts enough to avoid flubs from players with knowledge, which isn't always simple to do, but I don't think this negates the point in general. We all have to hear much more text in a quizbowl game than we are able to ourselves meaningfully "play," whether that be things outside our category specialties or simply the other team's bonuses. From experience, I can assure you that weaker teams experience this for most of the words read in a tournament. We owe it to them to make the parts they are most likely to hear just as interesting and engaging as the hard parts top teams fight for, even if that means stronger players have to bear some of the load of listening to more than they need to hear. In fact, this is in my estimation all the fairer, as top players by the nature of the game have this ratio of interest skewed heavily in their favor. I wonder how many top players totally forget what it's like to be a 10ppb player, if they think hearing words that do nothing to help them score points is a "waste of time."

I would go even further, in fact, and say so here only so my personal predilections stand as a counterexample to the problematic projection of some people's feelings on the matter to a general assumption about what is "wasting" players' time. Assuming that the set is overall controlled enough to play an efficient tournament as expected, I would much rather hear a set where every easy part contains something "unnecessary" of interest solely for its own sake than have the tournament end 15 minutes earlier. Even as a competent and experienced player, I find "[10e] This author wrote The Scarlet Letter." far more a waste of my own time than a part that weaves in something of interest from Hawthorne's work, to give a random example. I imagine I am far from the only one who feels this way, though I am guessing, but more importantly I simply think it is important to recognize that not every player, strong or weak, values maximizing the time efficiency of a set over other values. All that is to say nothing of the long-scale issues I've discussed above, too. In case it needs to be said yet again, that doesn't at all mean I think tournaments should be longer as a whole than present norms, or that this should ever outweigh practical concerns.

I know the above takes are not standard and may seem bizarre to some readers, but I hope it at least gets people thinking deeply about the matter. I think that undue focus on mechanical optimization for short term gains in quizbowl can and does blind us to the bigger picture of an evolving community and metagame, and moreover to the fact that we can be intentional about that alongside all the things to which we usually are. The valuation of concision beyond what is necessary for reasonable timeframes is, in my view, a part of this. If nothing else, I hope this serves as a reminder that what one likes about the game and how one prefers it may not be the best for a given other player, nor for the community at large. We all know this on some level and I hope it's clear I'm not impugning anyone's character, but I think we often lose sight of this when it comes to the norms of question construction, as the sorts of people who work on sets are not representative of a large portion of casual players, and in fact are not as homogenous in their preferences as the established consensus might suggest.
Last edited by jmarvin_ on Tue Nov 29, 2022 2:42 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Editors, please TRIM your bonuses

Post by Good Goblin Housekeeping »

jmarvin_ wrote: Mon Nov 28, 2022 10:14 pm Brevity is not an intrinsic good
yo w/ all due respect bruh this post is so long
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Re: Editors, please TRIM your bonuses

Post by Cheynem »

John makes some good points, and I think some of them are correct in a vacuum, but I'll say this:

I think the primary use of quizbowl questions are to be played by teams/players at tournaments. In that moment, almost all teams and players are focusing on winning the game and correctly answering the question, rather than learning an interesting fact or picking up new material on something they know. They, of course, will do that on some questions, both bonuses and tossups, but in general, that is not their primary focus. Furthermore, I think judicious use of these "interesting facts" can still appear in bonuses without the bonuses being too long--drop one in a bonus lead-in, etc.

Basically what I'm saying is that I think we should be gearing the questions primarily for their use in gameplay, not for studying or learning.
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Re: Editors, please TRIM your bonuses

Post by Gene Harrogate »

I appreciate the considerable thought and effort you put into your post, John. Your appreciation for unique aspects of quizbowl as a format especially comes through. I'd like, however, to push back on some of your assumptions.
jmarvin_ wrote: Mon Nov 28, 2022 10:14 pm
Brevity is not an intrinsic good

While it may be true that shorter questions are usually better, it would be a mistake to think this is because "shorter" is itself a kind of "better" in the domain of quizbowl questions. Shorter questions are better when some of the length is altogether unnecessary, and the same contents can be expressed in fewer syllables without sacrificing anything meaningful, but this is because length causes practical problems, not because concision is an intrinsic good. Trimming, as specifically targetted to the exclusion of the other concerns of editing, is a necessary evil, a sort of sacrifice that must be done to keep the game playable. There are in fact countervailing benefits which more length may sometimes afford the writer/editor, such that what seems to be "excess" length in terms of what knowledge is rewarded may not be "unnecessary" in the absolute, as the "excess" material serves some other purpose. For example, one could have aesthetic reasons to phrase a sentence in more words than it "needs;" I grant that this is almost never justified over and above the practical concerns regarding question length, and that most of the time one could argue for a question to be kept longer for aesthetic reasons there are other concerns at play that are the real difference-makers (like parseability at game speed or nailing things down). There are more salient potential boons to be gained from longer questions, though, which I'll try to point to below.
I'm not entirely sure what the "intrinsic" vs. "practical" distinction is capturing, but shorter questions are easier for readers, reduce cognitive load for players, and allow more quizbowl to be read in limited booking schedules. Improving moderator quality of life and playing more quizbowl do not seem to me to be necessary evils, but positive goods.
jmarvin_ wrote: Mon Nov 28, 2022 10:14 pm
Questions should be written to be studied, not just to be played

The final arbiter of how a question is composed should be how it plays in tournament, certainly. Nevertheless, I don't think this means that there aren't other purposes toward which one can and should write, if possible to do so without harming the playability. This is evident from a consideration of the reality of our game: people learn, study, and write future sets by consulting previous ones, and we should be writing our sets with an eye to this as well. It is my contention, and one that I tried to exemplify with my work on CMST II, that there are often times where longer phrasing does not negatively affect the way the question plays, but does benefit the future reader in their studying or writing endeavors. The quizbowl writer/editor, if sufficiently thoughtful, has the opportunity to not only test knowledge in a game but to communicate why that knowledge is important, relevant, interesting, and so on, both in the game but more importantly after it. A slightly longer phrasing of a clue can make future reader's lives much easier and more interesting by pointing study and writing-research in the right directions, making sense of things that aren't clear without prior knowledge, and so forth. Again, to be clear, this is only ever justified if length is already healthily controlled overall and if such decisions do not negatively affect the questions in the heat of a game. I think it's often worth the few extra seconds in a day, short enough as to have a negligible effect on the pace of a tournament, to enrich the future of quizbowl and its players. This applies as well to sneaking in things that merit future inclusion in quizbowl even as they would otherwise be impossible to ask about under the current metagame, although there's usually a better way to do so. I fundamentally disagree with the idea that this is a "waste" of anyone's time, as in the long run such things can pan out into better experiences for us all. The points below are meant to reinforce that claim as well.

I think this overstates the salience of the very secondary goal of making questions interesting for future readers of packets. If I had to guess, I would say something like 2% of people who play a college quizbowl tournament in a given year engage in any sort of meaningful packet study. Nor do I think that future writers are taking their ideas from extraneous information in bonuses, so much as using previous questions to cross-reference clues. It's fun as a writer to include extra information---after all, we want to milk the hour (or more) we spent on research for all it's worth. But I don't believe the reading audience exists that makes it worth sacrificing any present playability for studying entertainment.
jmarvin_ wrote: Mon Nov 28, 2022 10:14 pm
Teams who are largely playing for easy parts deserve substantial content
I actually believe overlong bonuses (especially easy parts) are mostly written to keep experienced players from getting bored. For many novices, the fact that Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote a book called One Hundred Years of Solitude is new information, and not necessarily rote or insubstantial. We should not overlook that novices are also here to play a trivia game, and to be rewarded for correctly answering questions on things they know. They're just as likely (or, in fact, rather more likely) to miss easy clues buried under extraneous information as are vets. My club experience shows me that, if anything, new players tend to dislike long bonuses as being hard to follow or slowing the pace of play. Novices, I reckon, feel plenty rewarded or stimulated by identifying what the question is asking for and coming up with the answer. I'd make a general point here that (unfortunately, I say as a quizbowl writer) the silent majority just doesn't pay as close attention to the details of questions as we might imagine.

A couple final thoughts: those new players are also hearing the medium and hard parts. Any player---new or old, who's interested in learning and playing at a suitable difficulty---will find something to edify them in almost every bonus, even if it's short. I also think that you're right that the default should not be short, dry easy part along with spicy medium and hard parts. We could be writing more to-the-point medium and hard parts as well (obviously easier said than done when trying to make hard parts as gettable as possible).
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Re: Editors, please TRIM your bonuses

Post by Mike Bentley »

Cheynem wrote: Tue Nov 29, 2022 12:08 am John makes some good points, and I think some of them are correct in a vacuum, but I'll say this:

I think the primary use of quizbowl questions are to be played by teams/players at tournaments. In that moment, almost all teams and players are focusing on winning the game and correctly answering the question, rather than learning an interesting fact or picking up new material on something they know. They, of course, will do that on some questions, both bonuses and tossups, but in general, that is not their primary focus. Furthermore, I think judicious use of these "interesting facts" can still appear in bonuses without the bonuses being too long--drop one in a bonus lead-in, etc.

Basically what I'm saying is that I think we should be gearing the questions primarily for their use in gameplay, not for studying or learning.
Yeah, strong endorse here. Creating great playing questions should overwhelmingly be your priority. I don't understand who out there needs an existing quizbowl question to give them more information on a topic. The internet exists.
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Re: Editors, please TRIM your bonuses

Post by naan/steak-holding toll »

If you're going to write a long bonus part, do so first and foremost for a reason that enhances the play experience (not studying experience) for that bonus part. I'd separate these reasons into two broad categories:
  • Technical: Adding more words/clues makes your bonus part easier for the target audience to convert, either by pinning the answer down better or giving them useful information to arrive at the correct answer.
  • Aesthetic: Adding more words/clues makes your bonus part more engaging to listen to, teaches something that a lot of the audience can appreciate, or otherwise makes the game more enjoyable to play for reasons that don't involve getting questions correct.
I think it's safe to say we're mostly discussing "aesthetic" reasons for bonus length here. Ideally, of course, "aesthetic" aspects have "technical" benefits as well. For example, a well-done theme on a lit bonus helps narrow down possible titles, authors, etc. without transparency.

As a writer and editor, one of your key tasks is balancing your audiences. Adding more information to your bonus part may well make it more engaging to some of your audience by teaching them new information; but Henry's totally right, it also may well make it less engaging to other parts by distracting them with a bunch of hard information they don't know. This is especially true of easy and middle parts which rely on a single clue to hit their difficulty target, and thus contain information that a lot of the players are likely to know.

Most of us all enjoy highly "aesthetic" bonuses with well-done themes, but not every bonus will or should be like this. Contextual lead-in information for the rest of the bonus, i.e. "lengthening the easy in service of the middle and hard" as John Marvin put it, is usually appropriate and appreciated. Chestnuts and humor in appropriate amounts make things more fun for people who don't know the subject. A ton of your audience will appreciate a hard but hilarious lead-in or a tightly-themed take on a well-known historical figure, even if they don't know the clues you're throwing at them.

Many other hard bonus clues, though, are what I'll call "non-distinctive," both in terms of not improving "technical" distinction among teams or "aesthetic" distinction of the bonus as part of a well-crafted gameplay experience. At their worst, such clues feel like they're written mainly for edification of the writer, not the player.
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