i have two comments. 1. i am not actually trying to compete for most-disliked player at stanford, and it's a good thing, because raj keeps upping the bar. but he is absolutely right that the way people get good is by studying. there is also, however, a much weaker effect: somebody with a naturally gifted memory can improve just by hearing lots of questions, whether at tournaments or at practice. that's probably the only correlation between "playing experience" and overall ability. most of the time, people do not become good at this game simply by being around it for a long time. 2. i don't want to discourage anybody from writing questions, but i've read several times in the past few days that "the best way to improve is to write questions." when i was a sophomore i thought this was true, but somebody (i think eliot brenner) pointed out that there are better ways. generally they consist of making and memorizing lists. now, i don't mean stuff like ye olde periodic table and nobel prize years (though, of course, if you do memorize those you will find that they are way more useful in this game than perhaps they should be). i mean jotting down a binary list of "clue -> answer" and then putting them onto flashcards or something so that you can train yourself to associate the clue with the answer, and perhaps vice versa (that last bit helps with bonuses more than tossups). you can do this with any set of questions you hear or read. or, to take it a step further, you can also make a concerted effort to learn a field that you don't know very well. a good place to start would be carleton's frequency of mention database. the only thing there is a list of titles paired with authors/artists/composers, but a) making sure you know who created each work there is important, and b) once you've done that, you can go for more in-depth knowledge on some of the works. however you do it, the reward will probably come faster if you can figure out a way to distill your studying efforts into clue- answer form. it's incredibly difficult, i think, to maintain a huge amount of real "knowledge" in your head in any organized fashion and be able to recall the appropriate bits fast enough to answer quiz questions. but reducing quizbowl to a glorified word-association game really helps. people are better at word association than they are at real thinking. of course, there are other considerations. making these lists and memorizing them generally benefits only yourself. (i suppose once you've made them into flashcards you could share them with your teammates, but it's much harder/slower to learn information on flashcards that somebody else has made than on your own flashcards, because the acting of creating each card helps you to remember it.) writing questions also helps you study (though perhaps not in the most time-efficient manner possible), and in addition a) allows your team to go to submission tournaments, b) gives you extra questions to read at practice (sometimes many extra questions, e.g. an entire tournament set for submitting a blind round for somebody's playoffs), and c) maintains the overall health of the packet-submission qb circuit. you might also find that writing questions is more "fun" than memorizing lists. then again, you might not--even though memorizing lists doesn't seem that exciting, the prospect of using these newly-learned clues to conquer your foes and impress the spectators in the future may keep you all hot & heavy as you assimilate the information. joon http://www.stegosaurus.org
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