Tune Up Your Brain Teaser Quiz Writing Skills

Answer: Altering

Anagram quizzes can take one of several different formats. The important issue is that the anagrams are complete words. For example, Q: Blur pi analysis A: Salisbury Plain. All the words in the clue are whole words. 'Blyrpi laanuiss', while it has the same letters, is not an anagram as they are not English words.

You can also make a sentence with the anagram in it and put a clue in the question. For example 'I wonder if STAN will catch the insects.' The capitalised word is the answer in anagram form, the clue about insects tells the player to rearrange STAN into ANTS. The sentence can be as silly as you like but it must read as a complete sentence with appropriate grammar and spelling.

Answer: Rescind

Rescind is the only option which contains all the letters of the word discern. Therefore, it is the only anagram listed.

To be an anagram, one word is rearranged into another word using all its letters. Using less than the entire complement of letters and rearranging them into a word is not creating an anagram. This is what we call a 'scramble' rather than an anagram. Scrambled words are no longer allowed anywhere on FunTrivia though you may come across an old quiz from when they were. Questions of this nature will be rejected.

Answer: 6

No more than six words per FITB answer please. Asking for more typing increases the chances of a typo, can lead to player frustration and dissatisfaction, and possibly lower ratings for your quiz. This rule varies across FunTrivia, so if writing a quiz for a different category, check that category's guidelines first.

Answer: Computer

Punctuation in any Fill in the Blank (FITB) answer is not permitted across all of FunTrivia. Different keyboards around the world produce different characters for the same symbol. This means a player could type a correct answer but be marked as incorrect. This unfairly penalises the player and is why FunTrivia has banned punctuation. You may find quizzes which do have punctuation. These are old quizzes written prior to the no punctuation rule. It's unfair to the authors to delete them so you'll still see them, but it doesn't mean we now allow punctuation.

You cannot write an answer without punctuation, e.g. 'dont' for 'don't', as it's not correct. If there are two correct ways to spell a word and one of those ways includes punctuation (e.g. deckchair and deck-chair), the question will be disallowed. Having the answer of 'deckchair' without its hyphenated counterpart means that players who enter the correct, hyphenated answer will be penalised.

Computer was the only answer without punctuation or an accent mark (the umlaut in glühwein), so it was the only viable FITB answer.

Answer: Punctuation is not allowed in FITB answers

Answers which are complete sentences and therefore would require punctuation are not usable. The exception to this rule is movie, book, song titles etc. as long as they don't have punctuation in the full title (e.g. 'Oliver!').

This doesn't mean you can't use the question but you will need to modify it. For example, you want the answer to be 'Actions speak louder than words.' in an In Other Words quiz. That sentence would normally require punctuation and you can't use it. Instead, ask for one word of the sentence. You could modify the question to ask:

'In the phrase 'Deeds verbalise more voluminously than distinct units of language', which word would replace 'deeds'?

The player still has to recognise the phrase 'Actions speak louder than words.' and convert the words 'deeds' into 'actions'.

Answer: No

There is no need to write both upper and lower case for the same answer, e.g. France and france. The system will see FRANCE, france, FRAnce, FrAnCe fraNCE etc. in the same way.

Answer: No

Several FunTrivia categories have their own WordPlay subcategories. These are: Entertainment, For Children (a limited selection of Wordplay quizzes), Geography, Literature, Movies, Music, Television, and Video Games.

Any quizzes with a dominant theme lending itself to any of these categories will be moved prior to it going online. A quiz with a mixture of subject matters, including those above, is fine.

Answer: True

All Brain Teaser questions now require at least one sentence of Interesting Information (II). You will see older quizzes without any II but they were written before this requirement was initiated. Be imaginative with the II. Give the definition of the answer, synonyms, a quote using the word in some form, movie titles, alternate meanings of the word, where the word originated, etc.

Answer: No - it's too obscure.

Brain Teaser quizzes should be answerable with a reasonable general knowledge and vocabulary. This isn't the place to ask who won the Best Actor in a Comedy Golden Globe in 1975 or the name of the dog which won Best in Show at Crufts, 1955. Please remember that players come from every country around the world and they may not know that Myrtle Fudgeknuckle starred in your favourite TV show of the 1950s which was only on air for three months on a local station.

For the record, Albert Einstein married twice.

Answer: Too many possible answers.

A good FITB answer should have no more than two possible answers. The President of the USA could also be written as 'president', 'The President', 'POTUS', 'Commander in Chief', 'The President of the USA', 'The President of the United States of America, 'President of the USA', 'The President of the U.S.A.', 'Commander-in-Chief' and more. This means it's very difficult to enter all the potential answers to a question like this. Keeping questions focused on one, perhaps two potential answers is the best way to write a FITB question.