SaladBowl 4: A Completed Work
After many, many hours of research, I have finally finished SaladBowl 4. Saladbowl was first conceived at a quizbowl tournament in my years of high school with the Manheim Township Quizbowl Team. I figured it would be a great name for a food-based triva tournament, and I started germinating the roots of what would eventually become a scaled yearly production.
Each SaladBowl is a packet of questions consisting of 20+ long-form tossup questions and 20+ three-part bonuses for a team to answer. I sometimes will develop a SaladBowl set entirely on a few distinct food groups, like SaladBowl 1, which focuses on salads. Others will span the breadth of culinary knowledge about historical and regional foods, while SaladBowl 4 is a new horizon entirely.
SaladBowl 4 asks questions about fictitious foods from movies, TV shows, and literature. These foods, while originally found in fiction, are very much foods that are replicable in real life, and are deserving of a mention in the SaladBowl canon.
I’ll take you along for the ride in my creative process in writing a set of SaladBowl!
The first step, for me, is always to flesh out which tossup answers I would like in the set. I prefer these answers to be foods, dishes, people, or events that are accessible to more than 85% of all players, but not immediately obvious from the get go. For example, if I wanted to write a question about the production of chocolate, I would have the answer be something along the lines of cocoa beans instead of a difficult Latin name like Theobroma cacao or something too easy, say, white chocolate.
Once the tossup difficulty is established, I try to find a diverse set of answers that will ensure a fair and balanced game that no single academic specialty will dominate. This means I try to spread the clues I give throughout the question among a wide variety of subjects, including historical events, scientific processes, mentions in literature, political and recent events, and etymological clues.
In my search for accessible tossup answers in the general food category, I come across many subjects in my research. Many of these food topics, like the Luther Burger, a burger with glazed doughnut buns, are very interesting but also lack widespread recognition among trivia players and salad heads. I would decide then, to write a bonus about it. Bonuses, which consist of three parts (easy, medium, and hard) can include some exciting new and difficult topics, as long as they also include easier questions as well.
Once I have filled up my quota of questions, it’s on the editing, pack testing, and packet finalization.
In my initial edits, I try to decide if the questions I have are an appropriate difficulty for the expected audience and if the bonuses match an easy, medium, hard (in any order) format. I look for spelling and grammatical errors and finally, read for the overall flow of the set to avoid two consecutive similar questions.
I have tested all SaladBowls thus far on the McGill Trivia Team, who play the SaladBowl during scheduled practice on teams. I use feedback on these tests to adjust the difficulty of certain questions whose difficulty I may have misjudged and to provide clearer questions when pronouns are uncertain.
When the pack is edited and tested, I move on to finalization. This is a final edit that runs over formatting, making sure that power marks (before which a tossup is worth 15 points) and answer lines are correctly set, and that the fonts, sizes, and spacings are consistent.
While each pack generally takes about 24-28 hours to write, including research and editing, there may very well be mistakes in the set, which are the fault of me and me alone.
The packets linked earlier in the post and here are the most up to date versions of SaladBowl. Find a reader, get your buzzers ready, and enjoy the set!
Many thanks, Nikko