>Also, I don't see the distinction between Trash >questions in primarily academic tournaments and >Trash questions in Trash tournaments -- is there >some kind of unwritten rule regarding >the "caliber" of trash subjects in academic >packs? I had assumed that those questions could >be anywhere in the general range of trash, >ranging (let's say) from the Beatles to disco, >or from "Citizen Kane" to "Battlefield Earth." >If I'm wrong on this, would someone please >correct me? I think that there is no single answer to this question, as tournaments, especially submission tournaments, have their own standards and what not. As a writer of academic and trash questions and as a packet editor in the past, my general rule on judging a "trash" questions use in an "academic" packet was the accessibility of the answer, which is also a general rule I tried to follow in academic writing. Depending on the distribution and the expected difficulty of a given tournament, will the mid-range teams be able to have a reasonable shot to answer this question and hopefully, will they have heard of the answer, or could put things together to form a cognizant relationship. What this generally means is that my Trash questions for academic packets will tend to be a little more general and my questions for trash packets will tend to be a little more in-depth (any player who has had to suffer through the deep knowledge bursts of some of my favorite TV shows will attest to that). Allow me to give a tangible example if I may from this year's MLK/ABD weekend at Michigan. MLK "trash" answers included: "Friday," "Wolverine" (the X-Man), and NBA starting point guards. ABD answers included: runabout, Jack Gallo, Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and Santa with Muscles. The difficulty of the questions that preceed these answers are consistent with the difficulty of the rest of the packet, which is perhaps the most important part of the process. The key is expectations. Do the players in the tournament expect the questions to be a certain way, and can you write questions for that expectation that are worth playing on and well constructed within the confines of the pyramid? This extends to the whole of the packet-submission world, with pop-culture being a
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