Hey, Whaddaya Know?

(Trivia Questions and Annotated Bibliography)

Research = not much fun.

Learning stuff other people don’t know so you can lord it over them = good times.

It is hard to say whether I enjoy trivia because my head is so full of it or because my head is full of it, I enjoy trivia, but either way I am one of those annoying people who will start a sentence with “Did you know . . . ?” and then tell you something you probably didn’t know and don’t care that you didn’t know.

I also shout answers out loud at the television during Jeopardy! In my humble opinion, I would win approximately 80 percent of all Jeopardy! games if I could overcome my paralyzing fear of being on television, and as long as I could stay away from any geography-related category.

Research of one kind or another is a dominant aspect of my work as a writer, and the only way I became even half-good at it was to do it relentlessly, while also being allowed to research within areas of interest. It is truly difficult, if not impossible, to become a fully capable writer without possessing some solid research skills.

This is a way to practice research skills without getting too bogged down in the researchy part of research.

Your task is to write five trivia-ready questions about a single subject. But there’s a twist: these trivia questions must not be answerable by searching a single Wikipedia page or on the first two pages of a Google search.

Each question and answer must include a citation—that is, a source (or sources) that proves their accuracy and truth. You may only use a source once. Five questions, five different sources.

PROCESS

1. Choose a subject area.

You’ll want to head toward a subject you’re already somewhat knowledgeable about, but you’re also unlikely to think of a good question off the top of your head by mining your knowledge. You want enough familiarity to be able to interact with the sources where you will find your trivia and not scratch your head in confusion, but you don’t need to be an absolute expert. You’ll also want to think about narrowing down to a workable category. Sports or music or chemistry might be too broad, but 1990s NBA or early 2000s rap or fluorocarbons could work. You could go even narrower, like a single figure within your category: Michael Jordan or Kanye. Or even narrower, like a single game or album. Also be prepared to jump subject areas. You may begin researching and find more promising territory. Don’t worry about that. You’re searching for trivia gold. If one spot is dry, you move along.

2. Go searching.

You may want to start with the Internet, but in this case it’s primarily a tool that will point you toward primary sources from which you can find interesting stuff that won’t be readily available on the Internet. You’re not looking for trivia questions. You’re looking to learn stuff. Take notes. Copy down sources. Be indiscriminate. Have you ever seen that game where they stick someone in a phone booth with a fan in the bottom and stuff it full of money and then turn on the fan, sending the money whirling around the booth? They always put like five thousand one-dollar bills and five one-thousand-dollar bills in the booth and you get to keep whatever money you can shove inside your clothes in sixty seconds.

The not-smart players grab bills one at a time, inspecting each one, trying to find the high dollar bills. The really not-smart ones then discard the one-dollar bills, sending them swirling back into the air, and possibly grabbing the same bill over and over. The smart players shovel as much money down their shirts, pants, socks, ears, and mouths as they can manage, hoping the high dollar bills are in there but settling for having as many one-dollar bills as possible.

Another way of saying this is don’t judge, just gather as many sources from which to draw trivia as possible.

3. Digest the sources.

Read your sources, but not too closely. You’re reviewing, skimming even, getting the gist so you know what your sources are about, where they might be useful for thinking about finding trivia. You’re gleaning enough so if you decide to use them later, you’ll know what they’re useful for and can dive into them in more detail.

4. Catalog the most useful sources.

Take the five best sources (or more, if you think you have a lot of useful stuff) and write short summaries of what the sources contain, as well as any ideas you have for possible questions that may come from the sources. Remember that to get five good questions you might need to start with a much larger universe of possible questions.

5. List all the stuff you now know that you didn’t know before.

Seriously, now that you’ve digested your sources, make a list of facts, figures, bits, and bites—you know, trivia.

6. Write trivia questions.

A good question is answerable but not by everybody. Of course you know the answer. When it comes to your subject, you know the answers because you’ve become a “Did you know?” person on your subject. You can write your questions in any form you wish: single answer, multiple choice, fill in the blank—whatever works best.

Sometimes you’ll want to combine bits of trivia into a single question like, “These two songs, both with ‘love’ in the title, were number one on the charts back in . . .” Think about how you can invent a question based on the deep knowledge you have about what you’ve been researching.

7. Test your trivia questions.

Find people who might be good candidates for your questions and see how they do. Reward them if they get four or five out of five correct. People love that. If everyone is getting them all correct, your questions are too easy. If no one can get them, they’re too hard. Try the questions on at least ten different people to see how they do.

8. Revise the trivia questions to your satisfaction.

You should aim for a spot where the average person gets three out of five questions correct. Some will get more. Others will get less. If your questions are too hard, rewrite them to make them easier by going with multiple choice. Or look at how Jeopardy! sometimes gives contextual clues inside the questions themselves, so even if you don’t know the answer, you can figure it out. Trivia that’s too hard is no fun. Make it just right. You may even have to junk a question and try something different. Such is life.

REFLECT

Go back to step 4 of the process and look at that document. If done well, it likely resembles something academics call an “annotated bibliography.” Annotated bibliographies are often assigned by writing teachers like me because we know they are very useful tools as part of the process of creating a researched piece of writing. Unfortunately, until you have done an annotated bibliography, it is hard to see how it might be useful, so when I assign them, students tend to view them as an arbitrary hoop to jump through in order to please the teacher, rather than as the way to help them process lots of information and become conversant on a subject relatively quickly.

Notice that you haven’t read everything you’ve found, but you’ve also sort of read everything you’ve found. You have a sense of the kind of information that’s out there about a subject, so if you were to write about that subject and ideas are forming and you realize you need a little bit of information, you know where to go looking.

Even though they seem like a lot of work, annotated bibliographies are real time-savers. They’re also “living” documents that you can continually add to and update over time. They’re a way of cataloging your own growing expertise.

We encounter so much information these days that it can be useful to have a tool to digest it more thoroughly, so if we need it later we don’t have to start from scratch. We can go to our personal annotated bibliographies and review what we already “know.”

For more formal and detailed information on annotated bibliographies in academia, do a search for “Purdue Online Writing Lab annotated bibliography.”

REMIX

Now that you know all this stuff, what could you write from it? Form and purpose don’t matter—meaning, I don’t care, you pick. Think about the rhetorical situation—audience, purpose, message—and define and execute a writing experience for yourself.