Looking for a Packet Writer?

[quizbowlchamp1]

Hi. My name is Russ McGlaughn. I am a Middle School quiz bowl player looking to help write packets. I particularly want to write for the middle and novice high school levels. The subjects I'm best at are history and auditory fine arts. If you want help, please post a subject distribution, a link to edit, and a deadline. I am happy to help. My rate is $5 per question.

Thanks,
Russ McGlaughn

P.S. This has also been posted on the Regular Season Tournaments forum. Please don't post anything about this being elsewhere.

[jonpin]

I am no longer a forums moderator, so I cannot technically tell you how to post. I have not been actively involved in writing quiz bowl questions for several years, so I cannot tell you what the current economy and mechanics of the writing process are.

But I can tell you that you are a seventh-grader, and a child. Under no circumstances should you be doing work-for-money for strangers. IMO, the only scenarios in which you reasonably should be writing questions are (1) for your own benefit, as practice for yourself and/or for your team, or (2) for a tournament being written by your own team. Even though you may not view it as such, if you are writing quiz bowl questions for someone else, and they are giving you dollars, that is a job, and that is at least to some degree child labor. There are reasons that NAQT requires the writers it hires to be at least 18 and graduated from high school.

Further, $5 per packet is a shockingly low rate. If you genuinely mean $5 for a 20/20 packet, that is 12.5 cents per question. That means you're either getting a rate of much less than a dollar per hour of work, or you are banging out questions in 5-10 minutes each. Nobody should do the first of those, and nobody should pay for the latter of those.

My advice for you would be to, for lack of a better term, cool your jets. Quiz bowl has a major problem with its best students burning out when they hit college. We do not need to fast-forward that process five years, and there's no better way to do just that then for an up-and-coming preteen to spend their entire Sunday writing quiz bowl questions for somebody else, in exchange for less money than it takes to go see a movie.

[quizbowlchamp1]

(1) for your own benefit, as practice for yourself and/or for your team

This is why I am doing this. I love writing and if I can make money while doing it, then I will.

Further, $5 per packet is a shockingly low rate.

What rate would you consider?

and that is at least to some degree child labor

(I promise I'm not being sarcastic) Technically, I am subjecting myself to child labor. According to its definition, child labor is work that deprives children of their childhood, their potential and their dignity, and that is harmful to physical and mental development. From where I'm standing, this isn't harming my physical and mental development (it's helping) and it isn't depriving me of my childhood.

All of this said, thank you for this post. It is extremely helpful and really puts all of this into perspective.

[RexSueciae]

What rate would you consider?

If you are writing questions freelance, a good rule of thumb is five dollars per question, not per packet, at the bare minimum. NAQT offers "up to $8.77 per tossup question and up to $6.78 per bonus question" to its writers (plus extra in bonuses for writers who are very consistent). A typical packet is 20 tossups and 20 bonuses, so a packet's worth of questions would be worth...about 40 times that.

And while you may totally be up for doing child labor -- and while the feds aren't going to kick down anybody's door if someone pays you a few dollars -- the logistics of writing questions (for money) as a middle schooler will be quite difficult. (More difficult than writing questions as a high schooler, which isn't easy at all.) Getting paid for your efforts would likely pose legal issues. My advice? Write the questions (particularly because it's a good way to improve knowledge) but stockpile them for now. You'll need to write a lot of questions before you start getting the hang of question-writing, anyways. And planning out a (hypothetical) housewrite can be kinda fun. But stockpile the questions, and don't worry about selling them until you've gotten a bit more experience.