Each student should supply seven questions on the passage or portion of the play assigned to the student.

    Every quiz question should be multiple choice, and have four to five answer choices (a through d, or a through e). In the file that you e-mail to me (at the address of p.r.morann@att.net), the correct answer among the four or five choices should be asterisked.

    Quiz questions are comprised of two parts: the question itself and the four or five answer choices. The incorrect choices in the answers have the technical name "distractors."

    The question part should not be too vague or excessively general. Also, questions should call for inference or analysis, not just fact or literal comprehension; plenty of secondary sources are available for mere plot summary both from print and the Internet.

    A quiz question may ask for particular, relevant literary terms or dramaturgical components (e.g., the nonverbal "language" of props, action, or setting), but such a question must be accompanied by another quiz question that also asks how the literary component is functioning thematically or expressively (e.g., in revealing aspects of life, the external world, society, human personality, human behavior, human nature).

    A type of question that may be used is the "all of the following except which one" type. Often a particular detail of the literary work has multiple meanings (technical names for this feature are "polysemy," "plurisignification," and "ambiguity"), so finding just a single answer choice for what the detail means may be more difficult than finding three or four meanings that the detail has, and then supplying a choice that does not apply, and is thus, paradoxically, the correct choice because it is wrong or doesn't apply -- that is, the detail means all of the following things except one choice).

    One kind of quiz question has none of the four or five answers incorrect individually, but just one answer being better than the others because the correct answer is more accurate or more comprehensive than the "distractors."

    "Distractors" should be plausible but not equally as correct as the correct choice. Plausibility in the multiple choices of a through d or a through e, includes not only content but form. Answer choices should be parallel or comparable in grammatical form as well as in number of words and number of syllables. For example, if all the answer choices were several words but one answer was one word, this choice (especially if the choice was the correct answer) would stand out. Uniform variation in answer choices may create a kind of parallelism; that is, if the answer choices to a question are one word, three words, five words, and seven words, respectively, then no one choice would stand out as different from the others.

    As a check for every question, ask yourself how you personally would apprehend the question, if you didn't already know the intent of the question or the correct answer. Also, use questions in my first quiz on Two Gentlemen of Verona as models.