Get Lynned wrote:I had a very detailed post that thoroughly explained all of the strengths I found in the set, while describing a couple problems, but unfortunately phpBB logs you out if you're writing something in the post window for over 30 minutes and will not save your work, so I'm not wasting more of my beautiful Sunday rewriting everything I had written.
I've definitely learned this the hard way myself. If you're planning a long post, I've found that writing it in a Word doc then copying/pasting it over to the forums seems to be a good policy.
Get Lynned wrote:#1: there were two questions that had bad lead-ins. The tossup on _elephants_ in round two mentions "two of these creatures named Castor and Pollux" after the introductory clause "as a result of a food shortage" in the first line. Player buzzed in on Pollux and said "giants". Don't know if literal giants befit Castor and Pollux, but "giant stars" I believe do.
So I was in the same room as Tom all day (and thus saw everything he did), and yeah, I felt bad about this one when it went down. After doing some very cursory post-tournament research, however, I was not able to find that the mythological Castor and Pollux were giants or any sort of other special mythological creature…from what I found, they appear to have just been twin humans, one immortal and the other not (anyone more knowledgeable on the subject can feel free to note if I am wrong here). With that said, I still probably shouldn’t have been so coy and just said “animal” instead of “creature” to prevent any players from thinking of the mythological twins. My apologies if any other players got tripped up on that.
As for a possible answer of “giant stars”, I personally wouldn’t really feel sympathetic to such an answer given that stars couldn’t really be described as “creatures” (also, I can’t find that both Pollux and Castor are actually “giant stars”, only that the former is). But I get your point about possible ambiguity.
Get Lynned wrote:The other question with a bad lead-in was in round 5, the final round question on James _Buchanan_. Player buzzed in on the first clue (which was "this president's inauguration coincided with a deadly sickness") and buzzed in on sickness and before the National Hotel clue was mentioned, answering (William Henry) Harrison. I am pretty well-aware that for most players, that's not enough to go off of, particularly if you're exposed to a lot of pyramidal quizbowl; however, given there are many teams that play Regionals with no pyramidal experience, we need to recognize that they likely may take buzzes like that because it's what they expect naturally in a first-line. Like the _elephants_ one, this one could've used a "he's not WH Harrison, but..."
Even if one subscribes to the popular narrative that WH Harrison died due to a sickness he caught on his inauguration day (which is disputed by historians), I don’t think it would make sense to say that his illness “coincided” with the inauguration – there would be a better argument for WH Harrison as an answer if the clue stated that the inauguration “caused” or “led to” a deadly sickness. Perhaps I’m splitting hairs here, though, and it’s certainly possible a majority of people agree with you that this wording could easily be misconstrued. As a former player, I’m definitely aware that it’s easy to misinterpret clues in the heat of the moment. I’m curious if this same issue popped up in other rooms. As with the “elephants” tossup, I apologize if this lead-in led to a lot of wrong buzzes.
From the perspective of a reader, it would have been nice to see more widespread use of pronunciation guides. I tried to be very cognizant to include them in my history questions, but they seemed to be pretty rarely used elsewhere. I probably had the most trouble with the science questions, which I feel is generally the case for many readers due to the often esoteric terms that are utilized. One specific thing that I did as head editor in past years to help with pronunciation specifically for science terms was use an interpunct to separate syllables. To take a random example from Round 1, “propylthiouracil” could have been changed to read as “propylˑthioˑuracil” (hopefully this is the correct way to pronounce this word?). I feel like doing this makes those long science terms much easier to quickly parse for readers (who, as has been noted many times before, have widely varying levels of experience at Regionals). Hopefully this is something future writers/editors will keep in mind and try to implement if possible. With all that said, I recognize that pronunciation guides are far back on the list of issues to address in a question set, so this is more of a minor criticism. Certainly they are nice to include in your sets, but definitely not something that is critical IMO.
If anybody else wishes to share any of their criticisms of the history questions (I also wrote the government portion of the “U.S. Government / Economics” category questions), please do not hesitate to do so. Thank you to Tom for kicking off discussion.