This document contains updated guidelines for formatting future ACF tournaments. We encourage all independent tournaments to adopt the guidelines promulgated in this document in the hopes of achieving consistency of formatting across all tournaments.
1. The purpose of formatting guidelines
Establishing standardised formatting in quizbowl serves three purposes. First, it establishes a commonly accepted, aesthetically pleasing formatting for all packets and enables writers to determine the appropriate length of their questions by setting a standard font size and margins. Second, a common format that is followed by all writers makes life easier for editors, who can avoid the pain of combining several differently formatted files into a single packet. Finally, a standardized packet is easily converted to XML and displayed online or imported into a question database.
2. The guidelines themselves- Packet Organization
- All packets should be submitted in a format readable on any standard Windows machine. Permissible formats include Word, RTF, or plain text. Please do not submit packets in HTML, outdated formats, LaTeX, or anything else.
- All packets should consist of tossups and bonuses, sorted by category. You may either sort by tossup/bonus first, then category, or first by category, and then by tossup/bonus.
- All packets should include the name of the writing team in the first line (e.g. "Packet by Berkeley B"). You may list the names of contributors at your discretion.
- Packet files should be named according to the following scheme: "Year - Name of Tournament - Team Name.doc" (e.g. 2007 - ACF Fall - Brown A.doc). Obviously, file extensions may vary depending on format.
- Formatting Your Questions
- All text in the packet should be written in Times New Roman, 10 point size font. Margins should be set to 1 inch. The text should be left-justified.
- Please do not number your questions. If you are using Word, turn off any auto-formatting features. When these are left on, they make trouble for editors.
- Avoid extraneous whitespace, including tabs and carriage returns. Tossups should begin with the tossup text, followed by either one or two carriage returns, followed by the text "Answer: " (may be upper or lower case), and then followed by the actual answer (see example below).
- Bonuses should begin with the leadin, followed by the first part and its answer (indicated as in tossups with the text "Answer: " on a new line, followed by the answer), then the second part and its answer, and so on.
- Each bonus part should be preceded on the same line with the total value of the bonus part, enclosed in square brackets (see example below). Please note that this is a slight change from before; whereas before you might have written "[5 each]" for a bonus part worth a total of 10 points, now we ask that you write "[10]" and simply state that two answers are required for 5 points apiece in the text of the bonus part.
- Do not insert any blank lines anywhere inside the bonus.
- All required parts should be bolded and underlined. If you are submitting your packet in plain text, please surround the required part by the underscore characters (e.g. _Napoleon_).
- Examples
- He lists Pepsi products under his Facebook interests, which led a newspaper reporter to contact him regarding Coca-Cola’s monopoly on his university’s campus. He was nicknamed “shades” because he wore sunglasses at an oft-maligned high school national tournament; he led his team to second place at Chip Beall’s NAC in 2006. FTP, name this Chaska High School graduate and current Minnesota quizbowler, the youngest man to ever win the CBI National Championship.
ANSWER: Robert Ford Carson (prompt on "Nachos Bell Grande"; do not accept "Pragmatic Sanction of 1713") - Give the following worst answers in quizbowl FTPE:
[10] You put numbers in boxes in this mindless game that some people think should be an answer for some reason.
ANSWER: Sudoku or Number Place
[10] Every question ever written on this phrase that signifies the end of a TV show’s popularity was ill-conceived, horrible, and transparent.
ANSWER: Jumping the Shark
[10] Name this curved yellow fruit.
ANSWER: banana
- He lists Pepsi products under his Facebook interests, which led a newspaper reporter to contact him regarding Coca-Cola’s monopoly on his university’s campus. He was nicknamed “shades” because he wore sunglasses at an oft-maligned high school national tournament; he led his team to second place at Chip Beall’s NAC in 2006. FTP, name this Chaska High School graduate and current Minnesota quizbowler, the youngest man to ever win the CBI National Championship.
We gave a lot of thought to these guidelines, so lest you be tempted to violate them, please consider that properly formatting your packet requires a very little amount of time on your part, and can save editors literally hours of work. Please do not use idiosyncratic fonts, weird spacings, different bonus part indicators, special Word characters, or any other eccentric formatting you may be inclined to use in other contexts. These things are not aesthetically pleasing and will have to be edited out anyway, and that's time editors could be using to edit questions. Please take seriously the naming convention proposed above; it is designed to make management of large packet archives as smooth as possible.
Please contact the ACF editing crew with any further questions about formatting.