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.

Teams are warned that failure to meet these formatting requirements will result in penalties being assessed.

2. The guidelines themselves

1. Packet Organization

   • Packets must be submitted as a file that can with certainty be opened properly on any computer running Microsoft Word 2002 and can support all of the formatting requirements below. I.e.: submitting them as .doc files, .rtf files, or an exact equivalent to either is strongly preferred. Packets submitted as Word 2007 .docx files are NOT acceptable since those files cannot be opened on older versions of Word. If any of the editors cannot open your packet on the first try, it will be returned and you will have to fix it before it is considered submitted for fee purposes.
   • Group questions together by subject in the exact order that they appear in the distribution above, then sort within category by question type (tossup or bonus). I.e., literature tossups come first, followed by literature bonuses, then history tossups, then history bonuses, and so forth.
   • At the top of the packet, put, in boldface, the tournament name (e.g, ACF Fall 2008 or ACF Winter 2009), followed on the next line by your school name. Be sure to designate whether it is the A team, B team, etc if your school is sending multiple teams. This should be followed by the names of all people who contributed to the packet and/or will be playing on that team. Thus, the top of every packet should look something like this:
     

     ACF Regionals 2010
     Packet by Reno Tech B Team (Travis Junior, Trudy Weigel, S. Jones, Jim Dangle)

   • Please consult the sample properly formatted packet. Make your questions look as much like that, aesthetically, as possible, while using the appropriate difficulty level for the particular tournament.
   • Packet files should be named according to the following scheme: "Year - Name of Tournament - Team Name.doc". The filename should be the name of your school, with the letter designating your specific team if your school is sending more than one. E.g. "2009 - ACF Fall - USC.doc," "2010 - ACF Regionals - UCLA B.doc," or "2010 - ACF Winter - Irvine A.doc" are examples of file names we wish to see. Obviously, file extensions may vary depending on format.

2. 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: ", 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).
   • 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_).

3. Format your tossups like this:

   Toward the end of its first act, one of the characters sings "I Know You Hate Me" after being whipped by the protagonist's wife. A peasant sings "Why Hast Thou Taught Me" to woo the hand of that wife, who is known as Columbine in Act Two. After Beppe sings an ode to Columbine, the protagonist confronts Nedda about Silvio, and when she brushes him off he stabs her, leading Tonio to end the opera with the line "La Commedia Finita." For 10 points, name this opera by Ruggierio Leoncavallo, whose first act ends with the melancholy "Vesti La Giubba" and whose protagonist is a very sad clown.
   ANSWER: I Pagliacci [or The Clowns]

   Note that:

   • The last sentence begins with "For 10 points" (not FTP or For ten points) followed by a comma and a space (not by a colon, a dash, or nothing).
   • "ANSWER: " begins a new line, is in all caps, and is followed by a colon and a space.
   • The required part of the answer is underlined and emboldened.
   • The instructions for prompts, alternate acceptable answers, or other additional information for the moderator are contained within brackets.
   • The question text DOES NOT begin with a number or an indentation.
   • The titles of overall works such as books, plays, operas, and paintings are italicized, and the title of works contained within larger collections, such as short stories, chapter titles, and songs from operas are contained within quotes.

4. Format your bonus questions like these:

   It was a response to the prejudiced selections of the official Salon de Paris. For 10 points each:
   [10] Name this art exhibition which was first held in 1863.
   ANSWER: Salon des Refuses [or Salon of the Rejected]
   [10] One of the prominent paintings exhibited in the Salon des Refusés was this huge Edouard Manet painting depicting a nude woman sitting between two clothed men in an outdoor setting.
   ANSWER: Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe [or Luncheon on the Grass; or Picnic on the Grass]
   [10] The Salon des Refuses also featured The White Girl, a painting by this American artist. The painting is also known as his Symphony in White, Number 1.
   ANSWER: James McNeill Whistler

   Name these places that one might see on a peaceful trip down the Danube, for 10 points each.
   [10] The Danube originates in this wooded mountain area in the far southwest of Germany which extends from Säckingen to Durlach.
   ANSWER: Black Forest [or Schwarzwald]
   [10] Before emptying into the Black Sea, the river passes through this capital of Slovakia.
   ANSWER: Bratislava
   [10] The Rhine-Main-Danube canal allows continuous travel from the Danube to the Rhine Delta, which is found on the North Sea at this city, the second most populous in the Netherlands and the busiest port in the world.
   ANSWER: Rotterdam

   Note that:

   • "ANSWER: " begins a new line, is in all caps, and is followed by a colon and a space.

   • The required part of the answer is underlined and emboldened.

   • The instructions for prompts, alternate acceptable answers, or other additional information for the moderator are contained within brackets and separated from each other by semicolons.

   • Each bonus part begins on a new line with the numerical point value of that part in brackets.

   • The titles of overall works such as books, plays, operas, and paintings are italicized, and the title of works contained within larger collections, such as short stories, chapter titles, and songs from operas are contained within quotes.

   • The bonus instruction indicates that the three parts are valued "for 10 points each" and either forms a general instruction for the whole bonus (in which case it ends with a period) or provides a specific clue pertaining to the first part of the bonus (in which case it ends with a colon).

5. The two types of bonus instructions

   Below are some examples of the two different types of bonus instructions. You are free to choose either depending on the structure of your bonus.

   Name these novels by Charlotte Bronte, for 10 points each.
   Identify these characters from Plato's Symposium, for 10 points each.
   Name these authors of works set in the Netherlands, for 10 points each.

   He drew a perfect circle to demonstrate his artistic prowess to the Pope. For 10 points each:
   The Longmen Grottoes and White Horse Temple are among the religious artifacts found here. For 10 points each:
   According to Hesiod, she is the daughter of Ceto and Phorcys. For 10 points each:

6. Using different point schemes

   If you write any bonus questions using different point schemes, then make sure to clearly reflect how the points will be awarded in the bonus instruction. If you use a "for the stated points" bonus format, then the value of each part should be indicated both in the brackets and in the text of the bonus parts themselves, like so:

   His essay "Some Remarks on Logical Form" and a preface he wrote for a dictionary for elementary schools are collected in his Philosophical Occasions. For the stated points:
   [10] For 10, name this twentieth-century philosopher of language, whose aphorisms are collected in such books as Culture and Value and Zettel.
   ANSWER: Ludwig Wittgenstein
   [5] For 5, at the end of this first book by Wittgenstein, he asserts that anyone who has understood the book's propositions can now discard them as one would discard a ladder after climbing it.
   ANSWER: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
   [10] For 10, Wittgenstein's most important later book is this work which claims that concepts denote "family resemblances" between things and argues that there cannot be a "private language."
   ANSWER: Philosophical Investigations
   [5] For 5, Wittgenstein once threatened this author of The Open Society and its Enemies and proponent of falsificationism with a fireplace poker.
   ANSWER: Karl Raimund Popper

7. Standardization of numbers:

   To make all the packets uniform in appearance, please display all point values and years in questions as digits, but all other numbers as prose words (e.g. "twenty-two years", "a million dollars" and "fourteen hundred casualties," but "For 10 points" and "1976.") Use the BCE/CE system instead of the BC/AD system for years, and remember to always include the correct designation alongside the years when there is the possibility of confusion.

8. Other notes on formatting and grammar:

   • Please delete all of your internal notes from the packet before submitting it. Editors do not want to see stuff like "lit: american (FF)" scattered throughout the document.
   • Pay attention to parallel structure and the antecedents of pronouns. Some rules of grammar can and should be ignored in order to make your questions pyramidal and concise, but those two are actually very helpful in making your tossups understandable. When you start a sentence with "The king won victories at Battle A, Battle B, and...", you need to conclude it with "Battle C," not "promoted his foreign secretary to vizier." You also need to make sure to avoid stray "this" and "it"s in your questions – if you want to refer back to a previous sentence, use a form of "that" instead to avoid confusing people about the answer.
   • Do not use any unusual Word templates, and pay attention when converting text from other file formats. If you paste something in, use the "paste as unformatted text" option so it doesn't bring a minefield of crazy style tags with it. There should not be any point in your document where that little template box in Word says anything besides "Normal."
   • Manual line breaks, tabs, and that little thing that looks like a degree sign should not be used ever. There should be nothing in your document besides letters, numbers, standard punctuation, italics, bold, underlining, spaces, and paragraph returns.
   • Do not use two spaces after a period, or anywhere else.
   • Remember that using parsimony in non-essential words keeps players from being bored and makes it easier for us to get tossups down to six lines and bonus parts down to two. E.g., "name" instead of "answer questions regarding" in bonus leadins.
   • Use one inch margins in your packets. This makes it possible for standardized length requirements to be meaningful.
   • Do not use the subjunctive when the simple past is suitable. Instead of "He would go on to write Bricks Without Straw" , say "He wrote Bricks Without Straw" or "He went on to write Bricks Without Straw." It just sounds better, places the clue more concretely in time, and usually saves words.

3. Final Thoughts

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.