Consider the following first line of a tossup: "One city in this country was led by rulers like Filippo Visconti and Ludovico Sforza.". What would you think the answer is? And why?

A lot of people would correctly guess "Italy". But unless you have a solid European history background, this has more to do with the fact that the names just sound Italian as opposed to hard knowledge about the subject. And this is a problem. Because if someone gets a question just because names sounds a certain way, this introduces some "unfairness"-- perhaps someone else knows more about Italian history but just won't buzz on name sounds alone. Unlike Jeopardy! questions, quizbowl questions are not supposed to be super guessable.

Answering a question from context clues alone is known as frauding. The more specific task of guessing on words based on their country of origin is called name frauding. Frauding is not wholly bad, nor should it be eradicated! But the amount of points earned through frauding should be limited; more frauding leads to more unwanted variance in the game. This means you have to be careful about the way your tossup unfolds. You may even run into a situation where an otherwise suitable clue has to be ruled out because of the possibility of name frauding.

Here's another first line of a tossup: "This Romanian sculptor created a work in which twelve hourglass-shaped seats are arranged around a circular table.". This one is a bit less obvious, but an experienced quizbowl player, even one without much knowledge of sculpture, would probably be able to correctly answer "Constantin Brancusi". Why? Because Brancusi is far and away the most commonly asked-about Romanian sculptor. Even Marcel Janco, the next most famous Romanian sculptor, has never been tossed up at the collegiate level. So even in the case that the answer is not Brancusi, a buzz like this is pretty safe since the question will probably go dead anyway.

This idea is captured by the concept of the solution space, which is the set of answers that a tossup could plausibly point to (assuming no knowledge of the specific clues). Some solution spaces, like "poets who write about death", are wide and deep. Other ones, like "Romanian sculptors", are rather shallow. It is generally good to either 1) reveal constraints that still have wide solution spaces or 2) hide the troublesome constraints (an example of this would be intentionally avoiding the use of Japanese names). It's worth noting that solution space constraints are different depending on your knowledge. For example, the clue "This author worked with Samuel Taylor Coleridge to produce Lyrical Ballads", restricts your solution space to authors who worked during Coleridge's career. And if you knew when that was (1795 to 1834), you could restrict your solution space to active poets during that time. And if you knew that Coleridge was English, you might further restrict your asnwer to English poets. But if you didn't know either of those things, then your solution space wouldn't really change.

A third way to fix the solution space problem is to use answerline calibration: using the same clues but a slightly different answerline to fix your problems. When I was writing questions for a high school tournament in 2019, I wanted to write a question on NAFTA. At the time, there were maybe 3 plausible "this agreement" answerlines under the umbrella of current events. So instead I decided to write a question on "this action", with the answer being "renegotiating NAFTA". In retrospect, this question was a bit hard for HS and the modified answerline led to some unwanted vagueness. But the core idea was there: you can often tweak your answer slightly to get the question that you want.

But name frauding and small solution spaces are ultimately secondary to a more important task: fair clue selection. I touched on this a little bit way back in Part I, but every clue that you use should be newsworthy. I was a bit vague about that, but let me be more specific. The clues you use should be important to why the topic in question is famous or worth knowing about.

Let us consider two Herman Melville clues that are approximately the same difficulty.

1. This author wrote an adventure story called Mardi and a Voyage Thither, which was his third work and was published by Harper & Brothers in 1849.
2. One of this author's characters contrasts his quiet inclinations with the “philosophical flourish” with which “Cato throws himself upon his sword.”

What makes something evocative? That's always going to be a judgement call, but clues can often be categorized by the Marie Kondo test: does it spark joy? Instead of trying to give specific criteria, here are some examples of evocative clue traits and non-evocative clue traits.

Non-evocative clues are often either...

• ...unrelated to why the subject is famous (e.g. irrelevant biographical clues), or...
• ...require very specific knowledge (e.g. specific dates unless the date itself has some special significance), or...
• ...not very likely for a player to remember or focus on (e.g. specific names of minor reactions).

Evocative clues are often either...

• "sticky" (e.g. a memorable quote), or...
• facts that ground other clues in context (e.g. an anecdote supplementing some event that happened), or...
• practically relevant to the subject in question (e.g. steps of a lab procedure).

Ultimately, the ideal clue is one that best differentiates between someone who has deep knowledge of a subject and someone who does not. Some clues fail to do that because they are asked about significantly more than their importance: this type of clue is called stock. The word is overused a lot, but there is a very valid sentiment behind the word: it's frustrating to lose out on a question just because the other team memorized some overused clue. Because learning is more than just memorizing facts! The best way to avoid writing stock is to make sure that your clues pass the Marie Kondo test: clues that are "stock" are very unlikely to spark joy. So write about information that makes you happy! If none of your clues are sparking joy, that might be a sign that you should be writing a different tossup.

But oce you have your joy-sparking clues, how do you put them together? We'll explore what makes a smooth final product in Part IV: Cohesion and Themes.