Write Your Own Quiz - Quiz4FREE Blog 5 (Easy!)
3 Best Tips
Many of you nice folks have asked for tips on writing your own quiz, so here's my best shot at getting you started in quiz writing. Follow these ideas and you should have a quiz written in almost no time at all.
Before we get into writing a quiz, I want to remind you that if you wish to publish your quizzes (On-line or Off-line) you must be aware that plagiarism is a BIG No NO! Here's a snippet from Wikipedia "Plagiarism is the representation of another author's language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions as one's own original work. In educational contexts, there are differing definitions of plagiarism depending on the institution."
However, if you just want to take a quiz along to your local for a quiz night etc. you can use a quiz from a book or one of our quizzes from one of our websites. Just don't publish it, or you could end up in trouble.
- Tip 1 - If you want some local content in your quiz, then read local newspapers and listen to local radio stations. Always having a note pad and a pencil handy. There's often a tasty tid-bit of information that can be used as a question. One question I found for my local quiz was 'What was the name of the local butchers shop that closed down last Friday'. Simple but effective.
- Tip 2 - Buy second hand quiz books from a charity shop (But remember my warning about plagiarism!). These books can be used as inspiration to help you come up with an idea for a question. Here's an example using one of our own questions - "One quarter of all the hops in the world are grown in which country?" Answer - Germany. You could write " Germany produces a quarter of all 'What' used in the production of beer?' Answer - Hops. See how easy that was.
- Tip 3 - Use the Internet. There are many ways to use the Internet to find questions. One way is to type in a famous persons name. In this example I typed into Google "Janet Street Porter" and found an article giving lots of information about her on Wikipedia -'Janet Vera Street-Porter CBE (née Bull; born 27 December 1946) is an English broadcaster, journalist, writer, and media personality. She was the editor and producer of the Network 7 series on Channel Four, which was awarded a BAFTA for its graphics. She was also an editor for two years of The Independent on Sunday, but relinquished the job to become editor-at-large in 2002. Since 2011, she has been a regular weekly panellist on the ITV talk show Loose Women.
Street-Porter has made numerous appearances on television programmes, including Question Time (1988–2015), I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! (2004), Deadline (2007), Celebrity MasterChef (2013), and Have I Got News for You (1996–2018). She was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2016 Birthday Honours for services to journalism and broadcasting'.
- As you can see there are a mutitude of possible questions you could make from this article. Type in anything that interests you and you will get some really great results that you can turn into questions.
I hope this short artical about writing your own quiz has inspired you. There are many other ways to find new questions, just think outside of the box.
Good luck and PLEASE let me know when you've written your first quiz.
Jim Ackroyd