What Makes A Good Puzzle ?
A personal response to Nancy Salomon's 
invaluable Sage Advice on http://www.cruciverb.com

Note: Nancy's advice is designed to helping new constructors of crosswords write puzzles that 
editors will buy.  I have adapted Nancy's points to address my own evaluation of double crostics.

N1) Look for part-of-speech mismatches. If you've clued "HUNGRY" as "Wants food", your clue will 
    be  rejected every time. Try the substitution test. "He ___ enough to eat a horse". 
    "Wants food" clues "IS HUNGRY", not "HUNGRY". This is the single most common mistake I see 
    from rookies.

S1) Agreed!

N2) Check if your clue is quite long. Editors have space constraints. There's sometimes a tendency 
    for newcomers to write mini-essays for clues.

S2) Agreed! If you like this cluing style, you can use it in a puzzle on my website by using 
    a relatively small number of clues.  In addition, avoid having any very long answers.   
    Make sure you test solve the puzzle online before submitting it.  If you have a large or 
    wide screen, remember that most users do not.

N3) Check if your clues are too short. A lot of one-word clues makes for a boring set. Consider 
    the oft-appearing entry EAT. [Consume] is probably the most boring clue there is. 
    [Chow down/Have a bite/Fuel up], etc. are all livelier.
              
N5) Ask yourself if your clue was pedantic. Clues taken straight from the dictionary are often 
    stiff and formal.

S3) I agree with Nancy's points, especially when the answer is one of several existing synonyms 
    for the clue.  However, I think each of her chosen replacements is somewhat unsavory: they 
    call up unpleasant body images. I have a very strict take on the "not before breakfast" rule.
    And to me, boring is preferable to unsavory. Of course,  there are many possibilities that 
    are neither unsavory nor boring: Florence Moore's clue for rhapsody - "George liked his in 
    blue"; Bron Burwell's clue for   trochee - "It trips from long to short, per Coleridge", 
    Mel Taub's clue for gobble - "talk turkey?".

N6) Have you gone overboard on fill-in-the-blank clues?

S6) I love fill in the blank clues, especially if they cause me to hum a great song or savor 
    a terrific line or prose or poetry.  As long as 20% of the clues are easy, there is little 
    danger that an acrostic will be unsolvable to an experienced solver.

N8) Even for easy puzzles, editors don't like the clues for longer entries to be gimmes. 
    
S8) I think 20% of the clues must be gimmes.  That doesn't necessarily mean lifeless.

N9) Was your clue absolutely accurate?

S9) Agreed. Sometimes people use the second or third dictionary definition as a clue, but I do not 
    think that's a very good way to make a clue harder.  As a solver, I suppose I should find it 
    educational, but I usually find it merely annoying.

N10) Was your clue convoluted? Many new constructors have trouble putting themselves in the solvers'
     shoes. They expect solvers to be mind readers. If it requires a complex chain of reasoning to 
     unravel a clue, odds are that clue will never see the light of day.

S10) Agreed.

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My own preferences:

I don't like words that have tacked on prefixes and suffixes (entwist,rewash,untutored).  
I have always wanted to ban them from Scrabble and other word games. I dislike overusing words 
(ethics,thatch,athwart) in acrostics; Yser in crosswords. I love beautiful words with unusual 
letter combinations, whether or not they are common or useful (pourboire,shelterwood,clerihew).

Ideally, the full set of puzzles on my site would use every root word in the English language  as 
an answer exactly once.  However, no single puzzle should contain more than three rare words.
These are inconsistent goals, but they show the direction I want to take.

Avoid "Kind of __" as a clue: it's generally too vague.

Personal prejudices - ideally, no puzzle should contain any brand names, sports, or recent pop 
culture references. As I understand it, this was the general policy in word puzzles prior to 
Will Shortz's innovations.  I'd like to roll back the clock on this one.

However,we have Lyricrostics and other variety puzzles dedicated almost exclusively to sports and 
pop culture. 

On the other hand, I don't think it's necessary to find a word in an established dictionary to 
justify it's usage. 

If you cannot make a puzzle really good - let the bad answers and clues be very easy and, perhaps, 
funny.


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The target solvership: Word nerds over 50.  I am trying to keep a balance between lovers of 
unusual words and "normal people", but it's a tough battle.


copyright by Sue Gleason  July 15,2006