Swerve

A swerve is related to a hose, in that the question punishes players who buzz in with knowledge of the answer. Unlike with hoses, the player is not the victim of blatantly wrong information (or information that "uniquely" identifies multiple answers); rather, the question "swerves" to a new direction by asking something tangentially related to the rest of the question.

Swerves and hoses are considered anathema to good quizbowl because they specifically inhibit players with knowledge from buzzing.

Types of Swerves

Left Turn

The left turn is the classic type of swerve, in which the question literally "turns" from one subject to another in the middle of the tossup. This is often caused by failure to correctly use pronouns. For example:

...He gained fame for starting the Kulturkampf as well as a war with France. (*) Otto van Bismarck lends his name to the capital of which U.S. state?
ANSWER: North Dakota

A player may buzz in at or before the (*) mark with "Bismarck", since the pronoun "he" seems to be talking about a man, and certainly not a state.

Irrelevant Information Swerve

Many bad quizbowl formats have questions that start out talking about one topic without identifying what the question is asking and then suddenly "swerve" to a new topic. For example:

...Looking both ways before you cross the street is a good idea. Looking both ways before you cross a railroad track is also a good way to exercise caution. Spell "caution."
ANSWER: C-A-U-T-I-O-N

The first few sentences are utterly irrelevant to the question that is actually going to be asked until at the last moment the question "swerves" to a spelling question (which is also usually not desired).

NAQT Left Turn

The NAQT Left Turn is the least egregious kind of swerve, not least because it only occurs on bonuses. It is named after NAQT due to its prevalence in NAQT, but is not solely relegated to NAQT questions.

In the NAQT Left Turn, one or more bonus parts have absolutely nothing to do with the lead-in to the bonus. Thus, the question turns in an entirely new direction from where players think it is going. This occurs on the second or third part of the bonus, so that the lead-in is still validly referring to the first part.

One exception to the above rule comes from the 2007 Matt Cvijanovich Memorial Novice Tournament, in which a bonus asking about uses of the letter k in chemistry was converted to a bonus in which the answers were "law of mass action", "equilibrium constant", and "Gibbs free energy", with only the middle part mentioning the letter k. This would have been fine, except that the leadin remained "Answer each of the following about a certain letter for ten points", prompting many players to become confused and think that the answer to the first bonus part contained a specific letter.

Although NAQT Left Turns are generally frowned upon, they are occasionally used to turn one part of a difficult bonus into the "easy part", and are thus not always considered bad quizbowl.