Glancing briefly at this year's ACF sets, Regionals and Nationals tossups were around 8 lines. Would it be better to have questions which were roughly one line shorter?
Some arguments for this shortening:
- Fewer clues means less writing to do.
This strikes me as particular relevant due to packet sub. Every discussion of the practice I can think of has mentioned how daunting teams find it. Packet sub is a valuable institution, even in the reduced state that it currently exists in, and if we're going to commit to keeping it then reasonable steps should be taken to ensure that the barrier to entry is as low as possible (without compromising the exercise).
Editors have to do a lot of writing from scratch as well, so they benefit also. Optimistically we can say that 13% less writing is necessary (though of course this is
very optimistic).
- Fewer clues means less editing to do.
The precise amount of "less" is again debatable - there are obvious costs to achieving concise questions - but this should at least be mentioned.
I feel like the task of editing has gotten a lot harder over the years as standards have risen, something that has probably contributed to the task being split among progressively more and more people. I don't think it's fair to simply expect editors to keep stepping up to this challenge - despite all the new names working on Winter and Regionals, it feels like only a few people are routinely willing to take on the high-stress, high-effort jobs like editing Nats. I have hope that the situation will improve and this will resolve itself, but I feel like it behooves the community to make things easier if possible.
- It is implied that there would be a small impact if lead-ins and other early clues were pared down, making them obvious candidates for removal.
The buzz point data that exists implies that the majority of first clues are not buzzed on by any players in the field - this includes at Regionals, which has both larger fields and (theoretically) easier questions. The simplest interpretation is that these clues could simply be removed.
- Shorter questions are played faster.
A nice treat for readers and players alike.
- Editors often have a sense of what can be cut.
I don't wish to overgeneralize, but in my experience I've had many more situations where I struggled to find the clues to finish a question than I have questions which were brimming to the point I had to pare them down. Additionally (and perhaps consequently), I've always known what the weakest clue was and it was often the one which was shoehorned in for length.
Some arguments against:
- It is not possible to just remove the lead-in/second clue from every tossup.
I am personally convinced that early clues at higher difficulties are "stochastic" rather than strictly pyramidal. I certainly don't mean to suggest to editors are not trying to order clues as best as they can, only that if multiple clues are below a certain conversion threshold then it becomes largely random whether a player will know one over another. This is, in mind, an argument
for keeping the clues - without concrete data that simply doesn't exist, it's not really clear which (if any) clues can be removed.
- Early clues provide something to both the players hearing them and later readers of sets.
Many players say that clues they don't buzz are still useful for providing context and what not. Seems perfectly reasonable, if hard to judge.
On the second point: I enjoying reading packets after the fact but I think it is silly to prioritize that. Then again, I don't think anyone is seriously arguing this.
- This would mean ruining perfectly good questions.
It seems mathematically certain that not every question could be shortened without compromising its integrity. This means things like ruining pyramidality, introducing cliffs, breaking sentence structure, etc. I guess these could just be left at 8 lines, but I do also question what fraction of questions would really fall into this category.
I do think it's worth noting that the thought experiment of "remove one line from existing questions" is not a perfect model: having shorter questions would simply produce different questions, some of which would closely resemble longer questions with one clue removed. I don't expect this to have the extreme impact on answerspace that result from the strict limits of ICT, but perhaps some ideas would become more feasible.
- There's no guarantee that this would actually improve things like lead-in difficulty.
This is one advantage that the "remove one line" model has: it explicitly handles the problem of lead-ins being too hard by explicitly removing them. This could be replicated in the mind of the editor, but it's a hard problem in general.
If not done somewhat deliberately, 7 line tossups could even have the same issues around lead-ins that 8 line tossups have. Perhaps then we'd argue for 6 line, then 5 line, and so on.
Conclusion
It seems like a lot of the arguments on either side are not based on hard facts - how could they be, when there are so few? In lieu of such empirical evidence, we might as well yell about it. Here is my piece; I welcome others.