This is an omnibus reply: <<My question then, is, "might there be a place in college-level quizbowl for occasional one-sentence toss-ups?">> There is if people want them, since this the subject matter and style of this game are arbitrarily chosen to conform with the preferences of those who participate and those who organize, in varying degrees. <I will add my 4/3 cents (I've got some Canadian change I need to get rid of).> Isn't that less than two cents, according to exchange rates? <I'd like to state what I think can be called a theorem: no matter how bad a question is, it can always be made worse by making it longer.> That would be a conjecture. I do think, however, that examining this issue can lead to questions as to the relative efficacy of 10-line tossups that some people write. <<One-sentence tossups do not have enough levels of knowledge to produce reliable results for comparison to longer questions. The problem with 2-3 clue tossups is not different from the problem with 1-clue tossups, but only a matter of degree.>> I think a more important question is what the difference is between questions of varying length. I won't argue that a question with more clues is theoretically better towards the goal of figuring out who knows more, although perhaps some writers out there may have markedly better execution in writing towards the short end. However, a 2-3 clue tossup also differs from a 4-5 tossup merely by degree. One question I could pose is whether the difference is sufficient that 40 short tossups are fairer in aggregate than 20 long tossups, even though a single short question is less fair than a single long question. Adam was prompted, so he says, by a desire for less monotony and more variety. In some ways, this is an atypical desire, as I suggest that most people desire security through predictability. The idea of a canon and strict stylistic guidelines are forms of creating predictability. At what point does monocultural rigidity cause tension? Some suggest that trash tournaments came about in part because of overly rigid emphasis on the academic. The circuit was created in part as a reaction against College Bowl tournaments whose questions were predictably the same style. The question of what degree of rigidity (or quizbowl ideology) becomes potentially counterproductive is something that may eventually need to be addressed by various quizbowl groups, entities, and individuals within themselves.
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