Subject: EDQ #10 - Outside Your Comfort Zone
Posted by: guitargoddess
Date: Nov 13 14
So you want to write a quiz outside of your comfort zone. Great! We always love to get quiz submissions from enthusiastic authors and would love to help you progress to writing great quizzes in any category. However, there are some factors to consider to make this experience a smooth one for both you and your editor.
In this EDQ I'd like to offer some tips for writing in categories or subjects you aren't used to or extremely proficient in.
1) Assess your expertise: While new or new-ish authors can experience hurdles in any category, it's relatively easy to write, for example, a Movies quiz about your favourite movie. Watch the movie (or maybe you have it memorized!), create ten questions and info blurbs about what happened in the movie, and you're done. You may need to research an actor's name or the year of release, or other small details, but overall you can write this quiz without any special expertise, or rather with only the expertise of having seen the movie (it is much harder to write this basic quiz about a movie you have not seen and I don't recommend it!)
Now, let's say that instead of a Movies quiz, you want to write a Video Games quiz. Think about your level of knowledge of video games. Is it zero? Or 0.5 out of 10? That's ok, you can still write a Video Games quiz. But your existing baseline of knowledge on the topic needs to play in to the type of quiz you choose to write. Which brings me to point 2.
2) Recognize the limits of research: If you don't have a ton of knowledge in the area you want a write a quiz in, you can research. In many subjects, however, there is a limit to how much research you can reasonably do to create a solid, coherent quiz. For that Video Games quiz from point 1, if your existing knowledge is zero, you shouldn't choose to create a very specific quiz about the details of a game you've never played (or of a game you haven't played since you owned an SNES in 1991). That's going to be extremely difficult to research, and research to the point that you actually understand it. Sure, there are all sorts of simulation videos and cheat documents available online where you COULD pull details from, but if you haven't played the game yourself, you won't know what's accurate, you won't be able to adequately put the information into your own words, and you'll have little to no ability to handle future correction notes from players who DO know the game inside and out.
That doesn't mean you can't write a Video Games quiz, or that you need to go out and buy a game and play it for a month straight so that you can be an expert on it. Rather, you're better off to.
3) Stay general - So it's not reasonable to do enough research to write a detailed quiz on the gameplay of a specific game. But it's perfectly reasonable to research a more general Video Games topic. Well-known games and characters can be researched enough to write a general name-the-game type of quiz. Or go a little more outside the box and write about the history of Nintendo - fairly easily researched online, and you wouldn't need to know specifics of any one game.
To sum up to this point, the scope and specific direction of your quiz needs to consider your current level of knowledge combined with what you can realistically research.
**See first reply for more tips**
Posted by: guitargoddess
Date: Nov 13 14
So you want to write a quiz outside of your comfort zone. Great! We always love to get quiz submissions from enthusiastic authors and would love to help you progress to writing great quizzes in any category. However, there are some factors to consider to make this experience a smooth one for both you and your editor.
In this EDQ I'd like to offer some tips for writing in categories or subjects you aren't used to or extremely proficient in.
1) Assess your expertise: While new or new-ish authors can experience hurdles in any category, it's relatively easy to write, for example, a Movies quiz about your favourite movie. Watch the movie (or maybe you have it memorized!), create ten questions and info blurbs about what happened in the movie, and you're done. You may need to research an actor's name or the year of release, or other small details, but overall you can write this quiz without any special expertise, or rather with only the expertise of having seen the movie (it is much harder to write this basic quiz about a movie you have not seen and I don't recommend it!)
Now, let's say that instead of a Movies quiz, you want to write a Video Games quiz. Think about your level of knowledge of video games. Is it zero? Or 0.5 out of 10? That's ok, you can still write a Video Games quiz. But your existing baseline of knowledge on the topic needs to play in to the type of quiz you choose to write. Which brings me to point 2.
2) Recognize the limits of research: If you don't have a ton of knowledge in the area you want a write a quiz in, you can research. In many subjects, however, there is a limit to how much research you can reasonably do to create a solid, coherent quiz. For that Video Games quiz from point 1, if your existing knowledge is zero, you shouldn't choose to create a very specific quiz about the details of a game you've never played (or of a game you haven't played since you owned an SNES in 1991). That's going to be extremely difficult to research, and research to the point that you actually understand it. Sure, there are all sorts of simulation videos and cheat documents available online where you COULD pull details from, but if you haven't played the game yourself, you won't know what's accurate, you won't be able to adequately put the information into your own words, and you'll have little to no ability to handle future correction notes from players who DO know the game inside and out.
That doesn't mean you can't write a Video Games quiz, or that you need to go out and buy a game and play it for a month straight so that you can be an expert on it. Rather, you're better off to.
3) Stay general - So it's not reasonable to do enough research to write a detailed quiz on the gameplay of a specific game. But it's perfectly reasonable to research a more general Video Games topic. Well-known games and characters can be researched enough to write a general name-the-game type of quiz. Or go a little more outside the box and write about the history of Nintendo - fairly easily researched online, and you wouldn't need to know specifics of any one game.
To sum up to this point, the scope and specific direction of your quiz needs to consider your current level of knowledge combined with what you can realistically research.
**See first reply for more tips**
14 replies. On page 1 of 1 pages. 1
guitargoddess
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A few other considerations: - Beware of loaded or complex questions. To be fair, if you’re not really an expert in the topic, you may not know how complex the question you’re asking is. The internet is your friend though. Let’s switch to History for an example here. You want to write a quiz on World War One. A fine topic choice. You write question 1 – “What was the cause of WWI?” From your high school history class, you remember the answer to be “Assassination of Archduke Ferdinand”. While that’s not exactly wrong, this is a very complex question! If you were to google “causes of WWI”, you’ll get several lengthy articles that talk about far more than just the assassination. No one expects you to go out and get a Master’s degree in history to write quiz, nor do you have to memorize one of those lengthy articles or even completely understand it all. But you’ll have to refine your question. “Which of these factors contributed to the start of WWI?” with the answer “Assassination of Archduke Ferdinand” would be better, as long as the incorrect answer options definitely have nothing to do the causes of WWI (so you’ll have to at least partially understand the research material to make sure of that). Acceptable interesting information in this case could be “The June 28 1914 assassination of the Archduke of Austria-Hungary is widely recognized as a cause of World War One, among myriad other factors, as it led to a conflict between Austria-Hungary and Serbia, and spread to include other nations who sided with one country or the other”. Now you’ve pretty much written the question you wanted to write, but avoided being too broad or too simple on a complicated issue. - Don’t feel you HAVE to write in any category you’re not comfortable with or don’t feel you can produce an adequate quiz in. If you’re at a stage in AinA where you can write Literature or Television, and you don’t own a TV and haven’t watched anything since M*A*S*H ended, there’s no problem with picking Literature, even if you’ve already written 100 Lit quizzes! Of course if you’d very much like to try your hand in TV, you’re welcome – but we can’t write your quiz for you. You need to have a little knowledge ahead of time and put the work in. - Don’t get angry if your quiz is returned to you. It’s expected that you’ll need some work and practice in categories unfamiliar to you, especially ones that have particular rules. The last Fractured quiz I wrote, spanishliz put a lot of time into helping me make sure I was following all the particularities of Fractured quizzes. I’d written fractures before, but most of them are housed in Music Word Play or elsewhere in categories that are not Brain Teasers, meaning they were never edited by a Brain Teasers editor, so things were missed and some issues I was never made aware of. Liz knows Brain Teasers well and was a big help on this, and in turn I felt better equipped to edit the next TV Fractures quiz that came in. As usual however, you have to do the work. Editors will gladly help you out, but if you resubmit the quiz without making changes or making a good effort to do so, you will find your editor no longer wants to help you, and why should they? If the History question example above was returned to you to do more research and refining, you cannot just resubmit it with a note saying “I don’t know anything else about it, just write it for me”. That’s not what the editor is here for. - Don’t forget about maintaining your quiz in the future. As mentioned above somewhere, you also need to be able to deal with future correction notes and required changes to your quiz. If you’ve left the site, editors will deal with these, but if you’re still around, you’re expected to be able to address player-submitted correction notes. You’ll need to be able to understand what they’re saying, and be able to adequately research to determine if the correction is valid or not. The inability to deal with correction notes is a "too late" indicator that the quiz topic was outside you comfort zone or expertise. - In the end, it just might not work right now. Sometimes a quiz is just not going to work. Sometimes even if you work hard on it and try to research it, you just won’t grasp the material enough to write a good quiz on it. No matter how many times I read the Wiki article on the subject, I will never have a good enough grasp of quantum mechanics to write a quiz on it. And that’s ok, there are other science topics that I could much more easily research and understand, should the mood to write a science quiz strike. Please don’t be too offended if a quiz is rejected outright because it just won’t work. This could be because of something technical that our quiz format just can’t really do properly, or it could be because your grasp of the material is just not there. It will be very very difficult to write a good quiz on English grammar if you are not a fluent speaker. The editor can only work with you so much; it’s just not going to happen. Try something else instead. You wanted to write a Humanities quiz, but the grammar one didn’t work. Try a quiz on musicals then! Maybe someday you can come back to the original idea and try again (Note: please make sure your editor is in agreement that your original quiz can be scratched and turned into something new. If they let you know the original quiz is just not working, this shouldn’t be a problem). Important reminder: Just because it’s for a challenge doesn’t mean it’ll go online. If you spent a week writing that grammar quiz because you were writing for Humanities for AinA, unfortunately you’ll have to try a new quiz to meet that requirement. We will not put quizzes online that have factual errors or an inadequate understanding of the subject (to the point that it affects the playability of the quiz and the facts contains); this is always at the editor’s discretion. While you’re encouraged to try a new topic or category, you do so at the risk that it won’t work out! Reply #1. Nov 13 14, 5:08 PM |
agony
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Just want to second that last point. To the editors, the quiz you write to get to a certain point in a game or challenge is just another quiz. Part of what you are doing in order to earn that badge is learning how quiz writing works, and how to work with the editors. If your quiz is not accepted because it does not follow the category guidelines, that does not mean the editor has done something wrong. It means your quiz does not follow the guidelines. Most Lounge authors understand this and are remarkably even tempered about it - I've had to reject all of one author's TRIC submissions for category problems at least once, and she's still talking to me - and we appreciate it. Reply #2. Nov 14 14, 1:08 PM |
JanIQ 
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In spite of not being an editor, I would like to add another point from my recent experiences. If you try to write a quiz in a category you've not addressed in some time, read the category guidelines first. They may have changed since the last time you wrote a quiz for this sepcific category. Reply #3. Nov 15 14, 11:16 AM |
looney_tunes
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I would suggest that you should check the category guidelines for every template you start, using the link at its top, even if you think you know them well. I do this for categories in which I do not edit, just to make sure that nothing has changed, and that I remember all details correctly. It doesn't take long, and can save a lot of frustration at a later stage of the process. Reply #4. Nov 15 14, 2:12 PM |
| agony
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Another point I'd like to make, a bit tangential, is that editors often do not know what the requirements of the game are. So saying "This is for TRIC X" or "This is for the Ascension Quest" doesn't necessarily tell the editor anything. Some of the editorial staff are very active in the Lounge and know a lot about what is going on there, while some have never entered the Lounge. Speaking for myself personally, I make a point of not participating any of the authoring challenges. I don't want my editorial judgement to be coloured by what I think of the various requirements of the games and challenges. I don't know what "TRIC Y" means, and I'm not about to go look it up. If it has something to do with the quiz staying in the category it's been entered in, then the author really needs to say that in the note. Please don't count on the editor knowing what you need to happen at this stage in your challenge, and don't count on the editor helping you to get there. To your editor, your quiz is a quiz, not part of another game. Reply #5. Nov 15 14, 5:50 PM |
Godwit
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Great tips, thanks! I had an understanding that it IS helpful to provide a note that might say for instance, "This is an Author Challenge title". So the Editor knows this specific title is important to the quiz. I had to have a 7-word title for one game, and I thought the Editor might like to know I wasn't just going crazy with an overlong title. Likewise, "This is a commission for the animals category". The Editor may consider that before deciding to switch the quiz to another category. If there is no note, then the Editor would think nothing of changing a category. Right? If the quiz doesn't fit into animals at all, of course the editor will need to do something about that. But, if there is a clear note, wouldn't s/he do what s/he can to work with the author to keep it in animals? Agony seems to be saying Editors don't take game or commission notes into account at all? Kindly clarify. Reply #6. Nov 24 14, 5:00 PM |
trident
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"Agony seems to be saying Editors don't take game or commission notes into account at all? Kindly clarify." This is not true precisely. We do try to our best abilities to take the category into account for the quiz and for the lounge activities. If, for example, a quiz could fit equally between two categories, but the author needs it to be in one category, we would likely keep it in the category the author needs. Or we might suggest that couple questions be altered so that a quiz would fit better in the category that the player needs for credit. However, I think the point that agony was trying to make is that at in the end, we cannot honor keeping the quiz in a category where it simply does not belong just because the author needs the credit for it to go online there. Lounge quizzes are subject to the same editor scrutiny as normal quizzes; it just happens that normal quizzes don't really matter where they are placed. The same goes for titles; if a title has a tenuous or no connection at all to the quiz, we will not accept it. This is why it is also important to contact an editor before you write the quiz to make sure it will find its home where it is meant to be. A lot of authors have been doing this, so we appreciate it! Reply #7. Nov 24 14, 5:39 PM |
| Godwit
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Ah! Thank you. It's all making sense now. Reply #8. Nov 25 14, 2:31 AM |
| agony
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Yes, trident said it more clearly than I did - essentially, the rules will not be broken for a Lounge quiz, though they might be very slightly bent. My other point was that if authors need something specific to happen with their quiz, they need to say so, specifically. It's much more useful to say "AinA quiz, must have this specific word in the title" than just "AinA". "TRIC - Y, must stay in this category" than "TRIC - Y". Don't expect your editor to be up on what the requirements of your game are - work on the assumption that the editor doesn't know anything about the game, and it's up to you to inform them about any limitations. Reply #9. Nov 25 14, 10:14 AM |
tazman6619
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Just a comment from an author's point of view. It seems to me that we as author's are the ones who bear the burden of making our quizzes acceptable under the guidelines of the site/category and within the task we are undertaking. The whole point of these endeavors in the Lounge is to learn how to write better and to expand our horizons. Editors should hold us to that and we should be the ones who bend. Reply #10. Nov 25 14, 10:57 AM |
| Godwit
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It's a team work thing! :) Agreed. The more we understand each other, the better. Reply #11. Nov 25 14, 8:13 PM |
zorba_scank
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It definitely helps to contact an Editor of the category you are aiming for when you're not 100% sure if your quiz will fit there. This has worked for me and saved a lot of trouble rewriting later. Reply #12. Nov 25 14, 8:21 PM |
Kankurette
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If I'm doing a quiz as part of a challenge or commission, I'll mention it in the additional info bit (or in the box for the mods at the top of the quiz if required). The only exceptions are some of the AinA / AQ quizzes I've done because I don't want to spoil the games for people who aren't as far as me. Reply #13. Dec 22 14, 11:10 AM |
| agony
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In the case of AinA, it is pretty important your editor know, so make sure that is in the box the editor sees Reply #14. Dec 24 14, 8:32 AM |
14 replies. On page 1 of 1 pages. 1
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