One of the biggest frustrations I've had over the past five years with editing questions is the sheer amount of time I spend not worrying about the factual contents of questions, but merely trying to slog through the mechanics and syntax of questions. The more time you have to spend just wrestling questions so that they make sense when read aloud, the less time you have to worry about things like ensuring pyramidality, researching (or rewriting to eliminate) alternate answers, etc. I will start with simple mechanics, as that is perhaps the most distressing problem. * There is simply *no* legitimate reason for typos, when even e-mail programs have built-in spell checkers. When you're done writing a packet, go through, and make sure that all the highlighted words are in fact spelled correctly. It doesn't take that long, and it makes the editors' job much easier. [Worse still are when *answers* are misspelled, as this can cause all sorts of problems.] * The second major problem I see is what could best be called "broken English." A lot of questions confuse the words who, whom, which, that, and/or what ("Name this athlete which...."), or contain unnecessary circumlocutions and other phrases ("Name this author, whose works include X, Y, and Z" instead of "Name this author of X, Y, and Z"). * Thankfully I don't see as much of this as I used to, but I still get questions that violate the "pronoun rule." The pronoun rule says that the first pronoun that (a) has no antecedent, (b) is not part of a direct quote, and (c) is not part of an impersonal grammatical phrase (e.g., "It is held that....") should refer to the answer being sought. These types of problems alone probably take close to an hour of editing time per packet to fix, and, as I said, an hour spent making questions usable is an hour that can't be spent making them better. --STI
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