"I Couldn't Have Said It Better" Quiz

Answer: A topic that you really want to write about

The first thing that makes a quiz great is an author who actually wants to write that quiz, not to complete a challenge, not to earn incredible ratings or an Editor's Choice award but because the author actually wants to create a quiz for others to play and learn something from.

While there are authors who can turn even the most dreaded topic into a good, lively quiz, the best quizzes are written when your heart is in it and you absolutely want that quiz to happen in the best way possible. (Although, to be fair, this "wanting to happen" can have many reasons - sometimes getting a difficult challenge provides just the right inspiration to do a topic you would never have thought of writing about and to do it well!)

Answer: How to best connect your questions into a greater whole

Connecting your questions with a theme and consistent presentation is one of the hardest tasks an author faces. You need to make your theme obvious and clear for it to be apparent to the player, yet every question must stand on its own to still be a good question when used outside the complete quiz context.

Think of how you want your quiz to tell a story or teach a lesson. Some topics provide this rather easily - if you have a historic event, you can often just let the events unfold in chronological order - for other topics, you may have to be more creative: Connect cities to a road trip or even write a poem that stretches through all your ten questions or info paragraphs!

Answer: Write down a draft or sketch in plain prose

Doing a quiz in an unusual presentation can be very rewarding and result in truly memorable works, but remember that even the unusual quiz is first and foremost a quiz! Even the most creative format must ultimately do one thing well: Make the player quickly and reliably understand what you want to ask. In addition, unusual forms are often hard to adjust once started - if later on you want to swap two questions, you'll find that almost impossible to do while preserving the sense and flow of the poem you've created to ask them.

By the way, forms as such cannot be copyrighted, so while you always need to make sure you don't copy someone else's work, you don't need to worry about copying a format. (However, this doesn't mean you can take someone else's text and just change a few words to make your questions. That's content, not form!)

Answer: What you want the player to take away from your quiz

Remember what I said about the importance of writing what you really want to write about and of making your entire quiz a coherent work? This is where these two come together. You have the content you care about and you have, hopefully, at least some idea of the presentation, but now you need to find the right angle.

If, as an example, you want to highlight your favorite band's best lyrics in a quiz about their greatest hits, your questions should all be about the lyrics, not about chart placements or the name of the album a song was published on. Use some of the greatest lines as the answers and be sure to also add information relevant specifically to the lyrics - if one song is a reference to a life event of a band member, relate to that event and make the connection for the player.

(As a side note, you should not choose an angle based on a title. The title serves the quiz, not vice versa. The exception is of course if the title was your initial source of inspiration for that particular quiz!)

Answer: Moderate: A bit of a challenge, but most players get more right than wrong

A universal truth is that players want to win, but they also want to feel they earned that win. After playing a FunTrivia quiz, seeing more green tick marks than red crosses feels like a success - a win - and if that win counts towards a challenge (where you often need 50%, 60% or 70% correct), even better! Just don't make it too easy: If the player never needs to even think, there's no winning feeling even if they get everything right because there never was a challenge.

You can of course make quizzes of any difficulty come out great by providing excellent theming, style and information, but by adding a sweet victory to all that, you make your self-chosen job of making your player happy that much easier!

Answer: Entice players to play your quiz with interest and curiosity

Title and introduction are for your quiz what a trailer is for a movie - your chance to get the potential audience interested. You obviously want people to play your quiz, but more than that: you want them to play it with an open mind, eager to score as well as they can and learn from the questions they get wrong.

One thing to absolutely avoid in an introduction is to set expectations towards the difficulty. If you underestimate it, players will feel bad about having done badly at what was supposed to be an easy quiz and if you overestimate, they might be discouraged from even trying. Since almost every quiz will be easy for some and very difficult for others, setting a difficulty expectation is an almost sure-fire way to guarantee you'll disappoint some of your players.

Answer: Choose one of the three formats and stick with it

Consistency is the name of the game! If you change the answer style around multiple times during your quiz, your players will need a few moments to reorient themselves, which is particularly nasty if they choose to play in the timed quiz game mode. Also, changing between keyboard and mouse operation can disrupt a player's thought processes.

If you want a multiple choice quiz with a few (one or two is best) fill the blank answers, try to fit them as the first or last questions (whichever fits better) so the player will need to switch only once. Adding a small number of true/false answers to an otherwise multiple choice quiz will also not detract much from the overall flow - the answer is still given with a mouse click.

Other than that, however, you're best off choosing the one format that is best for your topic and sticking with it throughout the entire quiz. It allows players to fully concentrate on your questions and info instead of getting distracted processing which format you want for which answer.

Answer: Use a clear structure and keep it the same for all questions

Having a clear, recurring structure is the key to presenting long, detailed information in a way that it can captivate the reader.

Let's say you're writing a classical music quiz about some outstanding symphony recordings and you've amassed a host of information about the composers, their works and the performances themselves. Now you can use three paragraphs in each information section - the first to give some key information about the composer (relevant to the symphony), the second to tell about the structure and important passages of the work itself and the third about highlights of the particular performance. Stick to that structure - you'll find that not only will it help you concentrate on the important facts but it will also help your reader quickly find what they are interested in!

Never use web links in your information - they are prone to becoming invalid and editors will likely remove them.

Answer: Ninth and tenth

While it is always best to have no weak spots in your quizzes, what you should absolutely avoid is something I see quite often in works by less experienced authors: They start out strong but then lose steam (either because they ran out of ideas or simply lost the enthusiasm), leaving the player with a certain disappointment. The strong beginning sets an expectation and the end of the quiz does not deliver.

If your quiz concept allows you to move the slightly weaker questions around, you can either place them near the beginning or somewhere in the middle and then end it with the best you have on offer. "Keep the best for last" also works for quiz authoring!

Answer: Give it a few hours, then do one final proofreading and submit with confidence!

It is a sign of a great work that you have that last little bit of doubt, the feeling that while you've done far above your average, you could still do better. The truth is that, yes, most likely you can, but only in a few small details. Give yourself some distance and then take a last look with a fresh mind and perspective. You'll probably find a wording or two that isn't perfect or you might notice that one of ten questions breaks an otherwise perfect pattern. Make the needed changes and then submit!

If you take too many passes, you risk to second-guess yourself and to overshoot the mark in your quest for technical perfection: You'll polish away all the emotion and spirit that drove you to make the quiz great in the first place!