Lateral thinking

"Lateral thinking" is a phrase originally used to criticize questions which could be answered by pulling out seemingly non-clue words and combining them with knowledge about the target difficulty of the tournament (or even pet topics of the specific writer). Questions which consciously reward "lateral thinking", and those which inadvertently do so, were both hallmarks of "bad quizbowl."

The phrase gained currency in quizbowl when Richard Dunlap used it in a horribly ill-conceived and anachronistic attempt to defend College Bowl in 2005. The gradual improvement of question quality since then has rendered this particular definition largely obsolete and the term is now commonly used in a manner more closely aligned with its conventional meaning.

References to the phrase "lateral thinking" or sarcastic after-tossup compliments such as "you figured it out" are common reactions to correct answers divined in this way rather than through actual knowledge.

Note that using lateral thinking clues very close to the end of a question in order to improve accessibility is not necessarily bad; using such clues early in the question (or for its entirety) is the problem.

Lateral thinking is an extreme and degenerate form of the Yaphe Method, and can itself be further extended and simplified into the Westbrook Method.

Example

Imagine a question on Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own which mentions "women," "writing," and parts of a house in its early portion. A player employing "lateral thinking" could assemble these words into a reasonable guess without having to identify any of the actual clues. A question which invited this sort of gameplay would go against the tenets of "good quizbowl," which prioritize rewarding higher levels of knowledge.