ThisIsMyUsername wrote:Every single tournament that I have worked on--including those in which I was merely a subject editor and not in charge of determining question length--has had a de facto minimum length requirement that the editors enforced.
No tournament I've worked on has ever had an
explicit minimum question length, which is what this requirement is. If there weren't already a consensus on the
de facto minimum length among editors, imposing a line cap necessarily creates a
de facto length close to the line cap: why, then, bar a 6-line question with an appropriate number of clues and gradation? It's hardly far-fetched that a good finished tossup could be between 5.5 and 6 full lines given there's a strict 7 line cap. Consider tossup 20 from the Dartmouth A packet from Regionals 2015, the first packet I opened:
6 lines exactly wrote:20. A 1901 contest to construct one of these buildings in Liverpool was won by Giles Gilbert Scott, who then completed that building with George Frederick Bodley. Bodley himself designed one of these buildings featuring Frederick Hart’s The Creation. One of these buildings in Christchurch was constructed out of cardboard by Shigeru Ban. Ronald Reagan’s state funeral was held in one of these buildings, which were designed with vast windows in the Rayonnant style. "Emmanuel" is the largest of ten huge bells at one of these buildings famous for its chimera statues and located on the Île de la Cité. For 10 points, identify these buildings exemplified by Notre Dame de Paris.
ANSWER: cathedrals [prompt on churches]
Cleaning up, like, two constructions gives:
5.75 lines wrote:20. A 1901 contest to construct one of these buildings in Liverpool was won by Giles Gilbert Scott, who completed that building with George Frederick Bodley. Bodley designed one of these buildings featuring Frederick Hart’s The Creation. One of these buildings in Christchurch was constructed out of cardboard by Shigeru Ban. Ronald Reagan’s state funeral was held in one of these buildings, which were designed with vast windows in the Rayonnant style. "Emmanuel" is the largest of ten huge bells at one of these buildings famous for its chimera statues and located on the Île de la Cité. For 10 points, identify these buildings exemplified by Notre Dame de Paris.
ANSWER: cathedrals [prompt on churches]
Adding "George" in front of "Bodley" gives:
6 lines and 2 words wrote:20. A 1901 contest to construct one of these buildings in Liverpool was won by Giles Gilbert Scott, who then completed that building with George Frederick Bodley. George Bodley himself designed one of these buildings featuring Frederick Hart’s The Creation. One of these buildings in Christchurch was constructed out of cardboard by Shigeru Ban. Ronald Reagan’s state funeral was held in one of these buildings, which were designed with vast windows in the Rayonnant style. "Emmanuel" is the largest of ten huge bells at one of these buildings famous for its chimera statues and located on the Île de la Cité. For 10 points, identify these buildings exemplified by Notre Dame de Paris.
ANSWER: cathedrals [prompt on churches]
If one accepts that this is at least a reasonably okay tossup, the best version is
clearly the middle one, in my opinion, despite it being the shortest.
ThisIsMyUsername wrote:Maybe you haven't read the most recent couple of ACF Regionals, but making it onto the seventh line has been the de facto minimum for a while. In fact, almost every question at the two most recent ACF Regionals made it onto the eighth line. I'm making questions shorter, not longer. The minimum that I'm enforcing has been standard practice, even if the fact of being completely transparent about its enforcement is new.
I'm not accusing you of making questions longer; I think a 7-line cap is a good thing.
ThisIsMyUsername wrote:To your second point: Editors do indeed have the responsibility to make questions better. (And I don't think I'm someone who has ever been accused of being lazy when it comes to overhauling questions.) But writers have the responsibility to make a good-faith effort to submit a packet that could potentially be used without further editing. Submitting a packet whose questions are below the normative minimums for Regionals question-length is an inherent violation of that social contract. The writer is submitting something that necessarily needs not merely editing, but more writing.
What I object to is setting a length
that a good question does not have to meet and forcing teams to adhere to it; it's essentially the most arbitrary of requirements -- after all, teams
aren't even required to submit good questions! I would argue that a team submitting a 5.75 line tossup is very far from submitting a question that is "below the normative minimums for Regionals question-length"; were it a good tossup, it'd be perfectly fine in a final set.
I don't find the distinction between a question needing editing versus more writing to hold much water: all bad questions, by necessity, need more writing. A lot more writing than a good 6-line tossup. Does that mean we should start rejecting packets with bad questions? No.
(not to get to far into this, but it's not the case that "writers have the responsibility to make a good-faith effort to submit a packet that
could potentially be used without further editing". When I wrote packets I always subscribed to the idea that I had a responsibility to make a good-faith effort to submit a packet that is as good as possible (for me or my team), a much lesser version of the above statement. But neither statement is an actual requirement for packet writers: they're only required to submit a packet meeting a specified distribution and a few other conditions to receive a discount. No one is required to submit good questions and even good writers do not try that hard to submit uniformly quality questions [now
that I view more as a violation of the social contract]).
ThisIsMyUsername wrote:I'm not under the illusion that the person who writes bad six-line tossups will now write an excellent seven-line tossup. But my experience is that many of the too-short tossups are submitted by very experienced teams, precisely the teams who do know how to write acceptable seven-line tossups once told that this is what is expected of them.
I have no qualms with this goal, but I don't agree with this method.
Cody Voight, VCU ’14.