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→On-Air Questions and Answers
== On-Air Questions and Answers ==
It's a good idea to phrase an on-air question to encourage short answers.
From Laurie:
<i>(These are excerpts from my emails to the Wombat listserver back in spring 2004.)</i>
<b>Guidelines for beginning question-writing:</b>
- You do NOT need to have a realm, subrealm, and song match on questions when you initially submit them. If you do, that's just great and peachy and wonderful – but if you don't, we can always add them later. Don't neglect to send a good question just because you can't think of a brilliant subrealm or something. Provide them if you have them, but don't worry about it if you don't. The question is really the point - the rest is just frosting.
- You DO need to check your facts. Seriously. It's very not-cool to get into a contest and find that the reason no one is getting the answer is because the answer is wrong. Generally, checking facts for a question takes roughly 30 seconds, so it's worth the effort.
- And finally, when you get a good on-air idea, write it down, write it down, write it down! People are always having great ideas and then forgetting them before they reach their email. That's sad. Don't do that.
<b>Guidelines for slightly more advanced question-writing:</b>
I thought I'd help out those of you who haven't written many questions before by providing what I think are two of the keys to making a good factoid into a good Trivia question, if you're interested:
1. Specificity.
QUESTION: A man in Europe found something weird in his house. What was it?
BETTER QUESTION: Last January, Pierre Duchamp returned from a shopping trip to find something highly unexpected in his kitchen. What was it?
It's not hard to figure that there are roughly 5 squintillion correct answers to the first question, and no way for a team to know which we want. The second, though, narrows the field enough that we can safely assume there's only one answer. This means that teams are far less likely to yell at us, which is good.
2. Comic timing.
QUESTION: Joe Schmoe holds the record for most raw giant squid eaten in one sitting. How many raw giant squid did he eat?
BETTER QUESTION: On March 27, Joe Schmoe set a new world record by eating 67 of these in 30 minutes. What did Joe Schmoe eat?
This one's simple - the most entertaining part of a question should almost always be the answer. Eating 67 squid is hardly more interesting than eating 52 squid or 74 squid, but eating 67 squid *is* more interesting than eating 67 cheeseburgers. Think of the answer as the "punchline" to your question, and organize it accordingly. After all, if you're going to wait the length of a song to hear an answer, you want it to be worth the wait.
== Song Length ==
