5 Tips for Writing Great Quiz Questions (+70 Sample Trivia Questions)

Nemanja Jovancic

Nov 29 2019

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You can’t make a great cake with poor ingredients. The right amount of milk, eggs, flour, baking powder, sugar salt – individually they don’t exactly taste great, but together they make for a finger-licking combination. When it comes to quizzes, think of quiz questions as your cake ingredients.

Anyone can come up with quiz questions, but it takes lots of trial and error, practice and skill to come up with engaging questions that make people complete your quiz. And of course, an easy-to-use quiz maker .

We eliminated the guesswork from the process, and we’re here with a mouth-watering cake recipe. Here is how to create quiz questions that absolutely captivate and thrill your audience.

5 Tips for Writing Amazing Quiz Questions

Number of quiz questions.

Creating a perfect quiz is a matter of trial and error and lots of split testing .

One of the factors that can make or break your quiz’ success is how many questions there are. Quizzes are inherently viral in nature and they’re very fun to do. However, the average quiz taker won’t have more than a few minutes to complete a quiz – so keep this in mind.

If you’re creating a trivia quiz (a pub quiz, for example), you need to make sure there’s at least enough questions to allow for some kind of ranking or meaningful score-based results. That being said, the minimum number of questions I’d recommend is 10 but it could easily go up to 20.

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On the other hand, if you’re writing quiz questions aimed at generating leads for your business, be careful as too many quiz questions can make the takers give up before the quiz is even done. Still, if there’s not enough questions (e.g. 3-5), the takers will feel like the quiz is too superficial to give meaningful outcomes. Consequently, they won’t be too willing to provide their email address once they’re finished with the questions.

However, lots of questions isn’t always a bad thing – you’re trading the number of leads for quality. Someone who just completed a 20-question quiz on sleep quality is much more interested in finding out how to tackle sleep deprivation than someone who gave up at question 4.

Data from our own research suggests that you should aim for at least 8-10 questions. In fact, 70% of the quizzes in our best performing list had at least 10 questions. With his Health Score quiz , Yuri Elkaim generated more than 10,000 leads in two months – the quiz had 20 questions.

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Martin Clinics’ Thyroid Quiz has had over 150,000 views total, with more than 50% people taking their quiz – which had 13 questions.

Want a cool tip? You can let your takers know how many questions there are in advance, in the very title of the quiz.

For example, Pick Seven Junk Foods And We’ll Tell You What % Trash You Are  is one of the best performing Buzzfeed quizzes of all time. You immediately know that there’s seven  questions and you won’t waste too much of your time doing the quiz.

Question content

This one is a no-brainer, but keep your questions on topic . Asking takers about their favorite breakfast food in a quiz titled Which Friends Character are You  is not only bizarre, it’s also deceiving the quiz taker. Make sure they get exactly what you promise them once they opt to take your quiz.

Use humor . Whenever possible, try to make your questions witty and humorous. It may sound simple, but this can be a pretty tall order depending on the type of quiz you’re creating.

For example, many of our case studies include medical professionals – it can be very difficult to take a humorous approach to something like respiratory diseases. However, you can always find ways to be funny and clever with your quiz questions.

Why is humor good as a quiz question element? First, it engages your participants and makes them complete the quiz.

Second, it shows that you have a personality and that you and your company have a unique brand voice. A little bit of humor can go a long way in building engagement and trust.

Make your questions interesting. Here are two examples for you to consider:

What’s the one item you cannot go without every day?

If you were on a stranded island, which of these would you take?

I don’t know about you, but I’d be more interested in replying to the second one. The more unusual, unexpected and remarkable your questions are, the more engaging they will be for the quiz takers.

Don’t try to be smart. Of course, we don’t mean this in the traditional way. If you form your questions so that you’re trying to trick your audience, you’re playing a losing game.

The participants will spend time racking their brains instead of enjoying your quiz, and chances of them dropping out before the quiz ends increase significantly.

Great quiz questions hit the sweet spot where they’re neither too hard or too easy. This is extremely important in knowledge-based trivia quizzes. And can be completely different when it comes to survey questions .

Spoiler alert:   Keep scrolling and you will find 70 sample general-knowledge questions you can use in your own trivia quizzes right now.

Question length

There’s one thing shared by the majority of high-performing quizzes created by LeadQuizzes users. The questions (and answers) are fairly short. Take a look at this example from a Thyroid Disease Quiz available as a LeadQuizzes’ template:

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The question has only six words and all of the answers have just a single word. Short questions are practical because it only takes a matter of seconds to go over them.

Your takers are bombarded with content  all day long and if you can save them time on reading your quiz questions – they’ll appreciate it.

How do you go about making your questions shorter? There’s a hint that you can take from the image above. Instead of a quiz question, create a statement, with answers such as Rarely, Sometimes, Never, Always, Frequently,  etc. Or you can keep it simple and adjust your question to the good old True/False  answer pair.

Another great insight from our best performing quizzes is to have identical answers to all quiz questions, as in the example above. There are multiple advantages to this approach.

First, you don’t have to spend a lot of time thinking about different answers.

Second, this will create a momentum for the takers and they’ll know what to expect after a couple questions – they’ll finish the quiz more quickly. Finally, you will have an easier time formulating the questions themselves.

Type of language

The kind of language you use for your quiz questions will depend on several factors. Who is your target audience? How much do you know about them, and how much do they know about the quiz subject matter? What effect are you trying to produce?

Ultimately, there’s one piece of advice all quiz creators should stick to – spare your words. Whether you call it verbosity  or wordiness , the symptoms are the same. Don’t use overly complicated terms that your audience won’t be able to understand.

Remember – the goal is to make the takers complete your quiz, not for them to think how smart you are. As a quiz creator, you’re also in the shoes of a copywriter. And good writers know that simplicity sells .

Take a look at this example from this Skin Care quiz .

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The language is simple and easy to understand, even if you’re not a native English speaker. All of the quiz questions in this example contain common, everyday terms.

And if you’re wondering if it works – it does, very well. This particular quiz generated 20,258 leads in just two months.

On the other end of the spectrum, don’t dumb your language down to the point where you’re using layman terms. However, don’t be afraid to use jargon and slang sometimes, if it is in line with your brand voice and the purpose of the quiz.

A trivia quiz  will be much different in language from a quiz on the type of supplements you should be taking to increase your muscle mass – you will have much more freedom of expression.

Once more, the only way to find out what works is to split test and see what the quiz takers and their behavior are telling you.

Quiz questions with image answers

A picture is worth a thousand words. In the case of quizzes, there won’t be anything close to a thousand words, but images can make a huge difference to your quiz.

The facts are there: 65% of people are visual learners  and over 90% of information coming to the brain is visual. On top of that, presentations with visual elements are 43% more persuasive .

Luckily, a quiz builder like LeadQuizzes allows you to insert image answers to your quiz questions.

Screen Shot 2019 11 29 at 2.10.22 PM

Don’t just take our word for it, see what the best quiz creators are doing. The majority of Buzzfeed’s best-performing quizzes  have one common trait – they include image answers to their quiz questions.

The ability to use image answers opens up a world of possibilities for your quiz questions. You can avoid having a lengthy question by presenting the situation in the answer. Moreover, if you can’t think of a way to make your question humorous, you can always attach a funny pic as an answer.

To help you come up with a great general knowledge quiz, we have compiled a selection of 70 amazing trivia quiz questions you can find below.

For other types of quizzes, check out our selection of 44 ready-made quiz templates  that include pre-written questions and answers.

70 Quiz Questions to use in Your Own Trivia Quiz

1. There is a village in France near the Somme which has a one-letter name. Which letter is it?

2. How many bones does an adult human have?

3. Which city has sporting teams named the Lions, Tigers and Red Wings?

4. Which sea creature has three hearts?

5. What is the Greek word for fire?

6. The principle telling us that the simplest explanation is more likely the correct one is known as Occam’s what?

7. What is the highest number used in a Sudoku puzzle?

8. In which US state did the Battle of Little Big Horn take place?

9. Which famous phrase stems from the doomed troops on board the sinking ship HMS Birkenhead?

10. What does GMO stand for?

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11. The ghost town Pripyat is found in which country?

12. Who sang about being an eggman and a walrus?

13. How many dots are used in each letter in the Braille system?

14. Mariposa, Motyl, Farfalla, Schmetterlinge, Borboleta, Papillon, and Sommerfugl are all European words for what?

15. What is one quarter of 1,000?

16. Which Cameroonian footballer is the only African to have played in four FIFA World Cups?

17. What is the common name for Japanese horseradish?

18. What is entomophobia?

19. What is a ‘kylie’ in Australia?

20. When did the French Revolution end?

21. Which Apollo 11 astronaut did not set foot on the moon?

22. The Daiquiri cocktail was named after a village on which island country?

23. In film. who has played characters named John Smith, Aldo Raine, Tyler Durden and Rusty Ryan?

24. In Greek Mythology, after being spurned by Narcissus, which heart-broken nymph pined away until only her voice remained?

25. Name the doctor played by Tom Baker, William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton, among others.

26. Which hero’s arch-enemy is Dr. Robotnik?

27. What is the well-known Arabic word for ‘The Island’?

28. Who wrote the poem Paradise Lost?

29. Duffel bags and Duffel coats. In which EU country is the town Duffel located?

30. Alec Guinness, Robert Carlyle, Anthony Hopkins, and Ian McKellen have all played which 20th-century historical figure?

31. A bicycle manufacturer, a US state capital and a county in West Virginia are all named after which Englishman?

32. The unrest in which Asian country in 2007 was called ‘The Safran Revolution’?

33. With 202,080 km, which country has the longest coastline in the world?

34. In which country was Freddie Mercury, the frontman of Queen, born?

35. Which national team introduced ‘Total Football’ at the 1974 FIFA World Cup in Germany?

36. What is the largest peninsula in the world?

37. On which day of the week did Christopher Columbus discover Dominica?

38. What is the largest inland lake in South America?

39. The name for which island country means ‘the old’ in Spanish?

40. What is the name of the radiation belt that surrounds the Earth?

41. Lumbini, the birthplace of Buddha, is located in which country?

42. Ackees, sapotas, and soursops are all examples of what?

43. What was the last black and white film to win an Oscar for Best Picture?

44. What did Chuck Yeager break on 14 October 1947?

45. What is the culinary term for cutting food into long thin strips?

46. What nickname was the horribly disfigured John Merrick given?

47. What is a serpent?

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48. What do both Vito and Michael Corleone have in their hands moments before they die?

49. What is the national flower of India?

50. Which city is home to Michelangelo’s masterpiece ‘David’?

51. Which writer was responsible for ‘The Three Laws of Robotics’?

52. What was the name of the official residence of Russian monarchs between 1732 and 1917? (the English name)

53. Which American singer-songwriter played Dracula’s servant Renfield in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 film Bram Stocker’s Dracula?

54. The following lines are from which popular 1989 Hollywood film?

“Is this heaven?” “No, it’s Iowa.”

55. Arctic King, Saladin, and Tom Thumb are which types of vegetable?

56. The Dutch woman Margaretha Zelle was better known as what?

57. Ka-Bar, Dirk, Puukko and Khukuri are all examples of what?

58. In which famous film does Dave ‘kill’ Hal?

59. In the US TV comedy show Everybody Loves Raymond, what is Raymond’s brother’s first name?

60. Jimmy Donal Wales is best known as being the co-founder and promoter of which internet presence?

61. Which French impressionist is famous for his paintings of ballet subjects?

62. Which actor, famous for playing the bad guy in many films, played Lee Harvey Oswald in the film JFK?

63. The name for which indispensable part of the Indian cuisine means “the fragrant one”?

64. Which classic car model was used as the time machine in the Back to the Future movies?

Screen Shot 2019 11 25 at 3.13.38 PM

65. Who invented jeans?

66. Which European capital city was built on 14 islands?

67. Which American rock star had a role in the 2000 film ‘U-571’?

68. What does ‘E’ represent in E = MC2?

69. Steven Spielberg was one of the co-founders of which movie studio?

70. Amongst the tribesmen he worked with, he was known as ‘El Aurens’. We know him better as what?

2. Two hundred and six

9. “Women and children first”

10. Genetically Modified Organism

11. Ukraine

12. The Beatles

14. Butterfly

16. Rigobert Song

18. An irrational fear of insects.

19. A boomerang that doesn’t come back

21. Michael Collins

23. Brad Pitt

25. Dr Who.

26. Sonic the Hedgehog

27. Al Jazeera

28. John Milton

29. Belgium

30. Adolf Hitler

31. Sir Walter Raleigh

32. Myanmar (Burma)

34. Zanzibar

35. Holland

36. Arabian Peninsula

38. Lake Titicaca

39. Antigua

40. Van Allen Belt

43. The Artist

44. The sound barrier

45. Julienne

46. The Elephant Man

48. An orange

50. Florence

51. Isaac Asimov

52. The Winter Palace

53. Tom Waits

54. Field of Dreams

55. Lettuce

56. Mata Hari

58. 2001 A Space Odyssey

60. Wikipedia

61. Edgar Degas

62. Gary Oldman

63. Basmati

64. DeLorean

65. Levi Strauss

66. Stockholm

67. Jon Bon Jovi

69. Dreamworks

70. T. E. Lawrence or ‘Lawrence of Arabia’

Key takeaways

Creating your perfect quiz questions isn’t rocket science – just a matter of a lot of thinking and A/B split testing to find out what works well for your specific case. Here’s a quick summary:

  • Keep the questions short and simple
  • Use everyday language
  • Keep your questions humorous and unexpected, but also on topic
  • Use our sample quiz questions given above to launch your next trivia today
  • Use our 44 quiz templates to launch any kind of a quiz within minutes

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If you’re looking for inspiration on how to use quizzes to generate leads, make sure to check out our case studies !

Try out quizzes for free

If you’ve applied all of our tips, your quiz questions will be engaging, to the point, and compelling enough to get people to complete your quizzes and opt in with their emails.

Did you know that quizzes can be much more than a fun way to pass the time? At LeadQuizzes, we’ve created a tool that lets you use quizzes to easily generate leads for your business. And it works .

Just ask one of our 7,500 users who generated over 3 million leads! Our quiz builder is super easy to use and provides you with all the necessary quiz creation tools, including ways to create questions, outcomes, lead capture forms and more. Once you have a finished quiz, all you have to do is sit back and watch the leads roll in.

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writing a quiz

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Writing Quiz Questions

Computer and books

Quizzes are incredibly useful tools in any online course. They provide students with immediate feedback on their learning, build metacognitive skills, enhance motivation, and create a sense of accountability. As you might imagine, automatically graded quizzes also allow you to easily monitor students’ understanding without additional grading.

Here we’ll discuss tips on how to create high-quality quiz questions of these types:

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  • Multiple answer
  • Short answer

In addition, we’ll look at some examples of how to avoid common pitfalls in writing questions and how to construct questions that test higher order thinking.

Multiple-Choice Questions

Multiple-choice questions require students to select the best possible answer from among multiple options. The question is called a “stem,” possible answers are “response items,” and wrong answers are “distractors.”

To create effective stems:

  • Keep the question concise.
  • Use simple, clear wording.
  • Avoid grammatical clues that give away the correct answer (e.g., using a or an at the end of a stem; using a singular or plural construction).
  • Avoid negative constructions (e.g., not and except).
  • If you must use a negative construction, be sure to underline or bold words such as not or except.
  • Make sure students can’t use information from one question to answer another.

To create effective response items:

  • Make sure there is only one best answer.
  • Ensure that every response is grammatically consistent with the stem.
  • Make sure response items have a parallel structure.
  • Avoid idioms and potentially confusing vocabulary.
  • Avoid absolutes (e.g., always and never).
  • Make sure the position of the correct answer varies.
  • Make the length of response items roughly consistent.
  • Eliminate repetitive or extraneous wording.
  • Use clear, consistent formatting, and indent response items from the stem.
  • Ensure that all items are mutually exclusive (i.e., avoid overlapping alternatives).
  • List response options in a logical order (e.g., alphabetically, chronologically, or numerically).
  • Avoid potentially confusing response items such as “A and B” or “B and C.” If there is more than one correct answer, use multiple-answer questions instead.
  • Avoid using all of the above and none of the above, but if you do use them, use them generously and not just when they’re the correct answer.

To create effective distractors:

  • Make every distractor sound plausible.
  • Avoid distractors that are trivial or nonsensical.
  • Use common student errors as distractors.
  • Create distractors from the elements of the correct response.

Once your stems, response items, and distractors are in place, you can add value to your quizzes by writing unique feedback for each response and distractor. Instead of simply saying “correct” and “incorrect,” consider writing feedback that explains why students are correct or where they can find the correct answer in the learning resources. That way, even in an automated medium, you help students understand the reasoning behind each response.

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Multiple-Answer Questions

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True–False Questions

True–false questions are fairly easy to generate and rely less on students’ language abilities than longer questions. However, because students have a 50% chance of guessing the right answer, true–false questions aren’t an optimal gauge of learning. To create effective true–false questions:

  • Avoid negatives. (The false condition creates a confusing double negative.)
  • Avoid absolutes. (They are rarely correct and students know it.)
  • Avoid ambiguous or confusing language.
  • Avoid combining multiple premises in the same sentence.
  • Target misconceptions (e.g., “True or false? The elliptical path of the earth’s orbit around the sun causes seasonal shifts in weather.”).

Matching Questions

Matching questions usually include two columns, the first with stems and the second with responses. Students then match each stem with its appropriate response. Matching is generally useful for gauging students’ understanding of relationships, such as their ability to match the following:

  • Terms with definitions
  • Causes with likely effects
  • Parts with larger units
  • Concepts with examples or illustrations of the concept
  • Problems with appropriate tools or methods to solve them

Short-Answer Questions

Short-answer questions are ideal when you want students to generate answers themselves with no prompting. Although you typically need to grade these questions manually, you can provide students with an “expert” answer to which they can compare their own answers. To create short-answer questions that are fair, effective, and easy to grade, be sure to do the following:

  • Create questions that are clear, circumscribed, and precise (e.g., “How did Darwin’s theory of evolution differ from Lamarck’s?”).
  • Decide in advance how you will assess answers, assign points, assign partial credit, and so on.

Avoiding Pitfalls in Writing Questions

To avoid the pitfalls of poorly constructed quiz questions, it’s helpful to analyze examples of problematic questions and consider how you can improve them.

Questions That Test Higher Order Thinking Skills

Thoughtfully constructed quiz questions can help you assess not only basic cognitive skills such as the ability to identify or define key concepts, but also higher order skills such as interpretation, generalization, inference, problem solving, application, and analysis. Here are some examples of questions that test higher order skills.

Quizzes are beneficial for both you and your students because they can help assess students’ progress in your course. However, if you choose the wrong type of question or word a question poorly, then you won’t know for certain why students answer incorrectly. Is it because they didn’t know the content or because the format of the question confused them? To make the most of your quiz questions, be sure to follow the best practices laid out in this article, and check out the resources provided below.

“Writing Multiple-Choice Questions That Demand Critical Thinking,” by Boston University Medical Campus http://sphweb.bumc.bu.edu/otlt/teachingLibrary/Assessment/WritingMultiple.pdf

“Writing Effective Questions,” by The Learning Management Corporation http://www.thelearningmanager.com/pubdownloads/writing_effective_questions.pdf

Is This a Trick Question? A Short Guide to Writing Effective Test Questions, by Ben Clay, Kansas Curriculum Center http://www.k-state.edu/ksde/alp/resources/Handout-Module6.pdf

“Writing Good Multiple-Choice Test Questions,” by Cynthia J. Brame, Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching http://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/writing-good-multiple-choice-test-questions/

“How to Write Better Tests: A Handbook for Improving Test Construction Skills,” by Cloud County Community College https://www.cloud.edu/Assets/PDFs/assessment/Inst.Strategy_How%20to%20write%20test%20questions.pdf

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How to write a pub quiz...and avoid these top 6 mistakes

How to write a pub quiz….

You don’t need to be a professional writer to learn how to write a pub quiz and create a well-crafted and balanced quiz. Over the years here at The Quiz Team we have learned what questions and formats can help you run a smooth, fun and challenging quiz night geared to your audience.

Sometimes people go wrong because they are trying to be too clever and the questions become convoluted, too difficult, or too niche.

Another major mistake is over delivering. What we mean by this is that the organizer adds far too many questions and rounds. Remember…people can have short attention spans, especially if you add food and drink into the mix.

How to write a pub quiz…and avoid these top mistakes

With these starter points in mind here is our list of the top mistakes people make when writing a pub quiz. We know this will steer you towards writing even better pub quizzes in the future.

1.      Questions are too long.

Questions that are too long can make your quiz longer and sometime more confusing to the participants. Having said that sometimes this is fine to do because you want to hone in on one answer but only include a few of these in a quiz. This is also a good technique to use to give more background to guide people to the answer.

2.      Too many possible answers.

Writing a well worded and structured question is essential to receiving the one answer you are looking for.

3.      Not geared to the audience.

As you would with a marketing plan you should look at who your audience will include on the night. As an example, it is no good writing a football or sport heavy quiz just because you love sport. A big plus of being at a pub quiz is that you can have a team with a wide range of knowledge. On the flip side…if you are writing a quiz for your workplace you can include niche questions about that business or industry. The same applies if you are writing the quiz for someone’s birthday or retirement and you have questions focused on that person or their life. Those niche situations will be geared to the audiences.

4.      Too many questions and rounds.

This is a common problem we hear about often. People will call us to request pub quizzes of 8-12 rounds of 10 questions each. Our regular format is a 40 question quiz with a half-time break which normally lasts for about two hours. This means a quiz with 8 rounds of ten questions plus breaks can easily go up to a whopping 4 hours! It is not to say you have to use our guide, but we do know that after 2 hours attention spans start to wane especially if, as previously mentioned, alcohol is on offer. We suggest quizzes with between 40-50 questions with rounds of 10-20 blocks to keep a rhythm.

5.      Questions are too difficult.

It is reasonable to include difficult questions as there are some very smart and informed people out there. The problem comes in if the entire quiz is filled with complex, little known facts that will exclude the majority of the people taking part. So, add some tough ones for the anoraks and those who like a challenge.

6.      Only catering to one kind of brain.

As many of you know we all learn and process in different ways. If a quiz only includes questions that are read out it can be challenging for those who are visual, or have other styles of learning. Our tips here are to include: visual rounds such as a picture sheet with art, movie posters and the like; music snippets; and even something for those who are kinesthetic learners (physical). This last group could benefit from a round such as chocolate tasting or a blindfolded bonus round with name that material.

If this all feels like too much…get in touch and we can design and deliver a pub quiz to inspire and entertain your guests so you can enjoy your night. We look forward to hearing from you!

We offer a full corporate quiz event service with a quiz, a professional actor host and equipment. Click here.

Alternatively buy one of our pre-written pub quizzes and host it yourself. Press here.

We look forward to hearing from you!

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Over 100,000 Free Trivia Questions & Answers with Printable Quizzes

10 Tips for Writing Great Trivia Questions That Everyone Will Love

April 19, 2021 By Anastasia Voloshina Leave a Comment

Yellow squares spelling out the word "questions" on a blue background.

It surprises many people to find out that you can write a question with an answer in mind . Likewise, you can find your answer along the way if you start with a good question . There are different ways of writing trivia questions, and there is a lot more that goes into it than just finding an excellent piece of trivia , or trying your hardest to “stump” trivia players with tough questions . More often than not, it’s about the question, not the answer.

From the very beginning, you can go in several different directions. Walk around your neighborhood and write random questions as they come to you, or sit down and brainstorm a specific topic. Of all the ways to write a great trivia question, you will learn 10 today. Maybe you’ve never written trivia before, or you already have a good question that just needs a bit of work to become great. Either way, bring your ideas and apply the following tips to them! And once you’ve mastered the art of writing trivia questions, don’t forget to check out everything else you need to know to plan for , how to kick your trivia night up a notch , and ultimately run an excellent trivia night .

1. Determine the Type of Question You’re Writing 

Bet you didn’t think it was possible, but there are many different types of questions. How is your question going to be received? Will you read it out loud or will the players read it off their computer screens? Is it perhaps a multimedia question, with a picture, video, or audio segment? Start by asking yourself what the purpose of your question is. Are you going to post it on your blog, sell it to a trivia night organizer, or use it in your own live trivia game?

2. Think of a Theme or Category

Trying to come up with a question can be hard. When you’re given the freedom to think of anything, you start to stutter. There are so many themes and categories; which one do you settle on? It’s almost always easier to work with a pair of horse blinders on to keep you on track. If that’s the case, settle on a category first .

A themed trivia night needs questions that match the theme. That also helps you narrow your focus down to one category. If you need inspiration, have a look at these categories . There are many to choose from. Choosing one or two to focus on will point your mind in the right direction. Working with a theme is easier because you know where to look and what to focus on. Rather than thinking of all the possibilities, you can think of one specific niche and push your mind in that direction.

3. Determine Your Audience

Black and white photo of an audience.

Who is going to be answering your questions? This is an important tip for trivia nights, where you’ll have to cater to a certain crowd. Given you have an idea of your target audience, you should work on writing questions for that audience specifically. Naturally, if your audience consists of middle-aged men, don’t write questions for teenage girls.

4. Do Your Research

Man staring at a board with numerous papers on it.

Unless you already have pretty good background knowledge of the topic, you can’t jump straight into writing. Chances are, you know little about the topic, or you don’t know enough to call yourself an expert on it. Start by doing some research first. General research will give you enough information about the topic to brainstorm the questions. Background information will give you the right tools to ensure your questions and answers are accurate and engaging.

5. Write Unambiguous Questions That Can’t Be Disputed

As a rule of thumb, every question should have one answer. If it has two answers, that should either be specified in the question itself, or you should think of ways to make the question more specific and unambiguous. The answer should be indisputable. Just imagine how embarrassing it would be to have to change everyone’s scores because of one silly mistake!

It might be your first instinct to try to confuse your players. That makes the question more difficult, right? A difficult question is not necessarily a good one though. What’s better than a difficult question is a simple question that makes sense and has a clear answer. Don’t try to confuse the players with your clever wordplay. Make sure everyone can understand the question and has a fair shot at providing the right answer. There are other ways to make the question difficult!

Avoid using adjectives and superlatives like “biggest.” The word can mean longest, largest in volume, largest in surface area, or tallest depending on the context. This will make the question confusing and the answer disputable. When you ask “What is the biggest country in the world?”, define if it’s by population, surface area, or any other metric. It’s best to avoid these questions altogether.

6. Make Your Question Better

If you’ve got a question brewing that you think is interesting but is not quite there yet, you can make it better by changing it slightly. Make it work by adding pieces of trivia to the question itself. For instance, instead of asking “Whose #1 hit on the US Billboard chart was “Heartbreak Hotel”?”, you can say “Elvis’s first #1 hit on the US Billboard pop chart also earned him his first gold record. What was the song?” Not only did you change the question, you also changed the answer.

The original question wasn’t necessarily bad, it was just a bit boring. Add some spice to your questions with the help of additional information. You can give the trivia pros a chance to answer before you’re done reading the question. Offer hints along the way to let real trivia lovers show themselves. Make sure your hints go from hardest to easiest.

7. Use Humor

Black and white kitten making a laughing face.

A really great question is kind of funny too. People of all ages respond well to humor. It’s entertaining, and what is trivia for if not entertainment? In other words, if you want to keep your audience coming back, make your questions funny. They don’t have to be laugh-out-loud funny; you can be sarcastic or witty, or use puns. 

The point of trivia is entertainment. People don’t come to a pub quiz to be humiliated in front of everybody. It’s not a high school biology quiz. Even if your questions pertain to the subject, they should first be entertaining and then educational.

8. Think About Others

When we write questions, we tend to focus on ones that we find interesting, thus kind of neglecting the audience. We’ve talked about the importance of preparing questions for your audience already. Your audience should not only know the answers, but also enjoy the topics you’re presenting. 

If you find the question amusing, that’s a good sign, but don’t stop there. Don’t rely solely on yourself to judge how good a question is. You might have some niche interests that other people don’t find as fascinating. Your questions shouldn’t be a manifestation of your interests only. Make sure everyone in the audience can have a laugh and answer the question, including you.

9. Avoid Answers in the Form of Numbers

White numbers on a red background.

This is not a math quiz; numbers are boring! Don’t beat yourself up if you’ve got some questions with numbers, that’s completely ok. However, don’t fall into that trap. It’s easy to come up with questions where the answer is a date, age, year, and so on. It’s not so easy to answer these questions though.

Right off the top of your head, you can probably think of some questions where the answer is in the form of a number. Don’t take the easy way out; your audience will be bored. If you insist on the topic of the question, you can rephrase it and put the number in the question. For example, instead of writing “When did the Second World War end?”, you can write “On September 2, 1945, U.S. General Douglas MacArthur accepted Japan’s formal surrender. That day signified the end of which global conflict?”

10. Make Sure the Answer Isn’t Too Easy or Hard

You already know that the question should have a clear answer, and there should only be one answer. If your question is impossible to answer, it’s not a very good question! A well-written easy question is better than a poorly written hard one. Your audience should be able to come up with the answer. Even if they don’t get it right, it shouldn’t be too far off.

Of course, make sure the answer is not too obvious either. If the answer is very simple, that’s no fun. Such questions are especially boring for seasoned trivia whizzes. In conclusion, the question should have an answer that your audience should know, but it shouldn’t be so obvious that it makes the game uninteresting.

How Can You Tell How Hard the Question Will Be?

“Hard” is a very vague term. What’s hard for some people is easy for others. However, sometimes you can tell if you know the answer early on in the question. If the question is well-written and long, it will give you hints along the way, from hardest to easiest. The point of a great trivia question is to give players the opportunity to answer before you’re done reading the question.

Those who are not familiar with the answer can at least learn some trivia along the way. You should be able to tell what the answer is from the very beginning if you’re that good at trivia. Still, that doesn’t make the question hard or easy. A great question is not always a difficult one!

What’s a Bad Trivia Question?

This question has a more specific answer. A bad trivia question is a question that makes you yawn. The purpose of the quiz is entertainment, so anything that’s not entertaining can go right in the trash. A bad question can be so because it asks you to present your answer in the form of a number; the year a device was invented, the date on which a celebrity died, the age a president was… 

Close up of a globe on a bookshelf.

That goes hand in hand with the Guinness Book of World Records questions. If your question was inspired by the Guinness Book of World Records , it’s probably a boring random fact that very few people would care to remember. For example, “How much does the heaviest man in the world weigh?” First of all, the question doesn’t specify if you’re talking about the heaviest man to ever exist or the heaviest man alive right now. Second of all, nobody cares. It’s probably an absurd number, but it’s not that fun to think about.

Another one is “What’s the diameter of the largest pizza ever made?” This one is a bit more specific, so it gets props for that. However, it’s still too specific and boring. The number is probably crazy, but it means nothing to the players. Don’t dig yourself into a hole with these “fun facts” and stick to interesting questions. If you really care about the diameter of the largest pizza, work that number into the question instead of making it the answer.

A Great Question Isn’t Always Hard

Many people mistake great questions for hard ones. A great question won’t always be hard to answer. In fact, it will have a clear answer that people actually know. A question that’s impossible to answer is a failure. Questions are meant to be answered (at least in trivia), so keep that in mind.

Yield signs with question marks on them.

Take these tips ( along with the many others we provide! ) seriously next time you’re working on a pub quiz or something of the sort ( especially if you want to avoid any legal issues! ). At the same time, have fun with it! As long as your questions can’t be misinterpreted, you’re all good. Easy questions can be great questions too, so don’t sweat it! And a great host can do wonders with any sort of question ! For some great question inspiration, look here . And like we said, have fun: do just that with this list of 101 super funny trivia questions .

writing a quiz

About Anastasia Voloshina

Anastasia Voloshina is a professional writer, editor, and trivia enthusiast. With an extensive background in trivia writing, Anastasia has developed a deep understanding of what it takes to run a successful game night. Anastasia got her Marketing degree in a university in Prague, where she also took writing classes.

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How to Write Good Quiz Questions [Tips and Tricks]

Table of Contents

Online quizzes are fun to take. But with decreasing attention spans, how do you ensure people stick around and complete the entire quiz? This is why it is as important to know how to write good quiz questions as it is to create a good quiz.

Questions are the most important element of a quiz. Anyone can come up with quiz questions, but it takes a lot of trial, effort, practice, and skills to come up with engaging questions that make people want to complete the quiz.

So, do you want to make an interactive quiz that is both fun to take and a sure-shot hit? Here are some of the tips on how to write good quiz questions to help you captivate and thrill your audience.

What Is a Quiz?

The term quiz refers to a test that evaluates a person’s knowledge, or a game consisting of a few questions on a specific topic or group of topics. Quizzes are used for entertainment purposes, academic purposes to examine students’ performance on a particular subject, or to generate qualified prospects for an organization.

A quiz can be of different types, for example, personality quiz , BuzzFeed quiz , trivia quiz , general knowledge quiz, and more! 

In addition to this, a quiz can contain several types of questions including multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blanks, true/false, etc. The type of quiz questions you choose to create and how engaging they are will determine the interest of a quiz taker in completing your quiz.

So, let’s learn some tips and tricks on how to write good quiz questions and how to make them more engaging and professional before you create your first quiz!

Tips for Writing Good Quiz Questions

1. direct and trending questions are the best.

First things first, you need to analyze your target audience and come up with a topic that’s trending, relevant, and informational, such as paper writing . Make sure you include interesting questions based on your chosen topic. The questions you create should support your objective.

Keep your question concise and try to omit any unnecessary information. Your audience should get exactly what you’ve promised them once they opt to take your quiz.

2. 7 to 10 Questions Is the Sweet Spot

Quizzes are inherently viral in nature and they’re extremely fun to take. But all of this depends on the number and types of questions you choose to include in your interactive quiz.

You need to make sure that you include just the right number of questions and provide insightful results at the end. It is suggested that you aim for at least 7-10 questions in your quiz. Less than 7 questions can make the quiz superficial and more than 10 questions can make the quiz takers give up before the quiz is even done.

3. Mind the Question Length

Keep your questions short and simple. Ideally, your question should be 6-10 words only. Short questions are practical and will keep quiz takers engrossed in your quiz. Reading long questions, on the other hand, can be a bit boring for the audience, and will ultimately make them lose interest.

4. Place Your Questions Systematically

To capture your audience’s attention, place your most exciting questions in the beginning. This will develop an interest in your quiz takers and motivate them to attempt the questions that come further.

Questions that are difficult to answer and require more thought should be placed in the middle to keep them engaged and committed to your quiz. And finally, ask the most intriguing question of your quiz at the end to finish it off with a bang.

5. Use Simple Vocabulary

People take quizzes for fun. Don’t make your quiz so hard that they start losing interest.

If you write questions with difficult words, the participants will spend more time racking their brains instead of enjoying your quiz, and the chances of them dropping out before the quiz ends will increase significantly.

Hence, it is important that you use simple vocabulary, and crisp and engaging sentences to make your quiz interesting enough.

6. Have a Consistent Number of Answers

Make sure you aim for 3 to 4 answers for each question. Unless and until you have a specific reason to change the number of answers like in the case of a ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ answer, each question should have an equal number of answers.

Also, when you’re writing the answers, make all of them unique and different from each other and cover the full spectrum of options available to you.

7. Use Images With Questions and Answers 

It is recommended to include pictures with your questions or answers. This is because people are more likely to get attracted to exciting graphics rather than simple content. Questions with image answers will make your quiz more appealing, entertaining, and interactive.

8. Peer-Review Your Questions

After you are done creating your quiz questions, share them with someone for review. Let others take a look and provide some objective, unbiased feedback. Acknowledge the relevant suggestions and make improvements accordingly.

Head to our blog on the types of questions an interesting quiz includes to get a better understanding of what we’ve discussed so far!

Components of a Good Quiz Question

1. it should have a purpose.

A good quiz question without a purpose and relevance has no value. The purpose helps evaluate the quality of a question against some set benchmarks. A good quiz question can seek both originality and specificity. Before drafting a question, you need to be familiar with the topic on which you are creating your quiz.

2. It Should Stimulate Thinking

Based on the Socratic model of questioning, if a quiz question is carefully structured, then it guides the audience towards understanding the concept wherein they can slow down and examine their thinking processes. It allows learners to think through and recall the concepts taught. On the other hand, it develops a curiosity in the audience to attempt the next question.

3. It Should Be One-Dimensional

A single-dimensional question focuses on only one idea or concept at a time. If there are multiple ideas to consider, then it is better to split them into multiple questions. 

For example, Which flagship Apple or Samsung phone should you buy and why? is a multi-dimensional question that requires your audience to examine two things at a time. It is therefore recommended to divide it into two different questions for better understanding, i.e. Which flagship Apple or Samsung phone should you buy? And Why should you buy an Apple/Samsung phone?

4. It Should Contain an Instruction Word or Phrase

An instruction word or phrase is a simple element of your quiz question that indicates how you’re supposed to approach the concept. Every question has a definite concept behind it and it should have an actionable or instructional word that provokes a simple response from a respondent. As a result, the audience can understand what the question demands and how they are expected to answer. For example, a subtext saying ‘Choose the correct option.’

That’s all about the components of a good quiz question. Interestingly, nowadays you do not have to rely on manual efforts for creating quiz questions. You can make use of Outgrow’s interactive quiz maker tool that offers professional premade templates with some thrilling quiz questions on various topics.

Interactive Trivia Quiz Questions

A trivia quiz can be fun and engaging. Interactive content such as trivia quizzes gives real-time results and engages viewers more than static content. 

But in order to create an interesting quiz, the first important thing is to create a list of exciting trivia questions. We have curated a comprehensive list of trivia questions from different categories which you can explore and include in your quiz to make it more interactive and engaging.

So, click here to take a look and choose from our wide variety of trivia questions for your upcoming trivia quiz!

How to Create a Quiz on Outgrow?

Creating a quiz can be a tedious task! But with Outgrow, you can create an online interactive quiz in just a few minutes by following these simple steps:

  • Log in to your quiz maker. If you haven’t created an account yet, then sign up for Outgrow’s 7-day free trial !
  • Once you’ve logged in, you can select from our wide range of templates or create your quiz from scratch. You can add new questions or customize the existing ones, set up the display features, title, and background, and change the text, font, colors, etc.
  • Optimize the results as per your requirements , set up the mapping as per your workflow, and add graphics to make your quiz more interactive and fun .
  • After you’re done with the changes, you can make your quiz live. You can also embed your quiz on your website, landing pages, and email newsletters, or promote it via a direct URL.

And that’s how you create interactive quiz questions for your quiz! We are bombarded with content wherever we go and therefore it becomes difficult to stand out from the crowd. That’s why it is important to create and incorporate interactive content for a delightful and unique customer experience .

We hope that this blog has given you some intuitive tips and tricks on how to write good quiz questions.

Let us know in the comments section below if you have any questions or if you want to add more tips for creating some amazing quiz questions. And if you want to try out some cool quiz templates for free, sign up on Outgrow .

You can use various types of quiz questions such as single-select, multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blanks, true and false, short answers, rank grader, numerical sliders, drag and drop, and so on. Incorporating the different types of questions in your quizzes will make your quiz more engaging and interactive. To know more, dive into our blog on different types of quiz questions.

There are multiple free and customizable quiz maker tools available online. You can check out Outgrow’s quiz-maker tool which is known for its interactive and customizable premade templates. Sign up for their 7-day free trial !

It is extremely easy to create an interactive online quiz. All you need to do is log in to an online quiz maker software, start adding your questions and answers, and drag and drop the elements to create your quiz with just a few clicks.

tanya

Tanya is a Content Writer and Marketer at Outgrow . She is self-driven and loves being creative and learning new things. When she is not working, she enjoys watching movies and web series.

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20+ Tips for Writing Great Quiz Questions and Response Options

Nicole Legault

If you’ve written quizzes in the past, you know how hard it is to write really great questions and realistic response options. It’s a tricky balance between something that’s an incorrect answer, but still plausible enough that the learner doesn’t dismiss it outright.

To make sure you get the best quiz questions and response options possible, refer to this checklist of 20+ tips when writing your quizzes:

  • All questions are related to learning objectives and course content
  • All questions present the learner with feedback that supports the correct answer
  • All questions avoid the use of humor, analogies, and cultural references
  • All questions avoid complex sentences, ambiguous terms, and slang
  • All questions avoid trick responses (this includes multiple correct responses, ambiguous answers, and overly abstract responses)
  • Avoid true-or-false questions, if possible
  • Response options that do not begin with the same word (if so, this word should appear in the question)
  • Consistent number of response options for all questions
  • All questions have at least 3-4 response options
  • All questions and correct responses have been vetted by an SME or expert
  • Avoid use of “all of the above” and “none of the above” in response options
  • All response options are realistic and plausible
  • All response options follow correct sentence structure to fit with the question
  • All response options are approximately the same length
  • All response options are parallel in grammatical structure
  • All response options contain the same amount of detail
  • Response options do not overlap or are too similar
  • Response options avoid the use of negative items (“Which of these items is NOT…”)
  • If response options must include negative items, negative words are all in CAPS
  • All correct response options are covered in the course material
  • Double-check all questions and response options for grammar, punctuation, spelling, formatting, contradictions, and use of active voice.
  • All questions and response options avoid the use of absolute terms like “always” and “only”

By checking all of your quiz questions and response options against this checklist, you can greatly improve the quality of your quizzes, and improve your learner’s experience taking your quiz.

Do you have any tips you’d like to share about writing more meaningful and relevant quiz questions and responses? If you do, please leave a comment!

You can always sign up for a fully functional, free trial of Articulate software. And don’t forget to post your questions and comments in the forums! We’re here to help. For more e-learning tips, examples, and downloads, follow us on Twitter .

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29 comments.

Ashley Chiasson

  • Ashley Chiasson

Karen Mineards

  • Karen Mineards

Hi Nicole.. thanks for these great tips. I wonder if you cvan help me with something else related to quizzes. I potsed the following on the Support Forum on Tuesday 8th April but I haven't heard anything: Hi, I hope you can help. I did find an archived post on my topic but didn't resolve it from that. I'm a newbie! I am using Presenter and Quizmaker 09. I have a number of quizzes throughout the eLearning which all learners MUST complete once. But they are allowed to go back to look at slides they have already seen. If they do this, when they go forwards again, I want them to be able to skip the quiz that they have already completed. Note, there is no pass mark, but learners must get each question correct before they can move on to the next question. I have the Properties of the sl... Expand

Cary Glenn

  • Terry Carter

Alison Martin

  • Alison Martin

Nicole Legault

  • Nicole Legault

Harri S

  • Dana Kocalis

Sara Strickler

  • Sara Strickler

Nicole Legault

  • Rod Squires

New user of Storyline2. I see above it recommends not using "all the above" or "none of the above". When I developed some quiz questions I had a couple with "all the above" as a choice and also a few that provided three specific responses (A, B, C) and the remaining two choices as: D. A & C and E. A, B & C. On one of the questions the correct answer was E (A,B & C). However when a colleague tested the quiz they selected A, B & C before than selecting E but they did not go back and unselect A,B & C so it came back as INCORRECT because it considered only E as the correct answer. So my question is why do you recommend not using "all the above" or offering a choices like my example above? Is it because there is no way to make questions like this work in storyline2 or is there a... Expand

Hi Rod! In your case, it sounds like best approach would be to do multiple choice rather than a Multiple select, and then make E the only correct answer. However, in general, I think that kind of question is confusing and tricky for the learner (including all the options as A, B, and C, and then also including an "A, B & C" option as option D or E) and should be avoided altogether. The reason I recommend against using "all of the above" and "none of the above" has nothing to do with the Storyline software, it only has to do with instructional design best practices. Usually those choices (all of the above and none of the above) are used too much and as a filler, instead of thinking of meaningful choices. Also, they can lead to confusion as I mentioned previously. That's why I Recommend aga... Expand

Daniel Moore

  • Daniel Moore

Chance Hunter

  • Chance Hunter

Eileen Fernandez-Parker

  • Eileen Fernandez-Parker

Susan Doyle

  • Susan Doyle

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Exactly How to Write Quiz Questions and Answers From Scratch

writing a quiz

You may have noticed that some of the biggest names in online marketing are using quizzes to massively grow their email list.

People like Lewis Howes , Jenna Kutcher , and Marie Forleo love utilizing Interact quizzes for lead generation, but can you create a successful quiz WITHOUT needing to have a big name behind it?

It’s possible, and we’re going to show you exactly how to write your quiz questions and answers so you can start generating more quality leads and improve your sales growth (by as much as $50k like TONIC Site Shop or $100k+ like Kaye Putnam ).

Seriously, every part of the quiz writing process will be broken down in this step-by-step guide.

There’s over 5,000 words of insider advice on how to craft quiz questions and answers from scratch that make your audience want to sign up for your email list and buy your products or services and deepens their relationship with you as a trusted expert.

With no time to waste, let’s dig into the first step.

Choose a quiz topic that fits your niche

It’s kind of hard to write quiz questions and answers that pack a punch before you know what quiz topic you’re going to pursue.

Okay, make that impossibly hard.

Choosing a quiz topic is one of the most important decisions you’ll make, but it also can be one of the easiest.

Depending on what your niche is, you may already have a quiz topic that you know will connect easily with what your selling and what your audience is wanting to learn from you. If those are the same thing, you’re making a smart business move.

But before you launch into quiz topic ideation, let’s make sure you know what your goals are.

Defining your quiz goals

You don’t want to create content without having an idea of what you want it to accomplish. In order to start your quiz-building journey on the right path, take some time to define a few top-level goals that will help you determine what success looks like with your quiz.

What is my ultimate goal with the quiz?

While it’s great to create a quiz just for fun, most of us are hoping for the quiz to turn into some actual business results. You only have so much time as an entrepreneur, so the content you create has to work for you.

What are you hoping for your quiz to accomplish? Is it to triple your email list growth, double your digital product revenue, or increase the number of quality leads you receive through your website? These are the more common goals with building a quiz but that’s not to say there aren’t other goals that might be important to you.

No matter what your quiz goals are, it’s best if you can clearly define what they are and include benchmark numbers that you can aim for. Quiz analytics inside our Interact dashboard can help you measure your growth and see if you hit your benchmark numbers, like this example from Kaye Putnam .

image

What does “success” look like with the quiz?

This ties in with the first question, but you can break down what success looks like even more. Your ultimate goal may be to book 10 discovery calls each month from the quiz, but what does that actually do for your business?

Booking those discovery calls on autopilot with a quiz might help you free up time for other business projects without worrying as much about outreach marketing. It may help you attract more quality leads who already understand your philosophy, process, and personality.

Keep breaking down your goal until you have a few tangible results that would come from a successful quiz. Remind yourself of these things as you create your quiz so every step stays intentional.

What do I want quiz takers to walk away knowing?

Your primary goals might be to grow your email list or attract more quality leads with your quiz , but what about your audience’s goals? They matter, too! After all, your quiz takers will be the ones determining whether your quiz is a success or not.

Before you choose a topic, it’s important to think about what knowledge you want your audience to be armed with after completing your quiz. Do you want them to have a better understanding of themselves or their business? If so, what does that look like in relation to your niche?

In the end, you’ll want to give your audience enough information so that they:

  • acknowledge your expertise, thus building more trust in you
  • feel like you deeply understand how they’re wired
  • feel confident starting a relationship with you through email marketing
  • are primed to eventually buy your products or work with you

Ready to see these quiz writing tips in action?

For the rest of this article, I’m going to be walking through the exact quiz-building strategy I use as a quiz copywriter . You’ll get to see how I write quiz questions and answers from scratch along with how I’d implement the quiz in Interact.

Instead of creating a quiz about writing (although there are plenty of quiz templates to choose from in this category), I wanted to do something a little different.

For this example, I’ll be creating a full quiz from start to finish as if I am a graphic designer who specializes in social media graphics. Now that’s a niche!

As I go through each section, you can follow along and create a quiz of your own.

Let’s get started!

Perfect! With that step done, let’s move into the next section.

Brainstorming a list of quiz topics

With your goals in mind, it’s time to shift gears and create a list of potential quiz topics. Some quiz creators get tripped up here because they don’t know what quiz idea will be a winner.

The first thing to remember is that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

All you need to do is find a topic that matters to your audience and relates to the product or service you want to highlight.

Yup, it only needs to satisfy those two things.

When in doubt, you can use the tried-and-true quiz title formula of “Which [Blank] Are You?”

When we analyzed 40,000 Interact quizzes , over 70% of them used this form of quiz title. The numbers don’t lie. It’s the easiest and most effective way to start brainstorming quiz topics.

Need some more help?

Here are a few more ways you can choose a quiz topic that fits your audience:

  • Brainstorm quiz topics based on your industry by customizing one of our quiz templates  
  • Get inspiration from successful Interact quiz users who have shared their case studies
  • Look at some of our favorite quiz examples in virtually every niche

In the meantime, I’ll share a few ideas that fit the social media graphic template theme.

After reading through the list, the title “What is Your Social Media Style?” jumps out at me the most. The word “style” would feel like a fit with my audience because they care about having visually appealing social media graphics.

If I wanted to put my own spin on it, I could add an adjective in front of “social media style” to brand it even further. If you have a catchy brand name or a branded theme for all of your service packages, you can find ways to weave it into your quiz title.

If my brand was called Savvy Graphic Designs (yes, I totally just made that up), I could create a quiz title that felt more unique and branded to me by saying my personality quiz will help you find your “Savvy Social Media Style.” The more you play around with this, the closer you’ll get to finding a quiz topic that feels like a natural fit.

After putting the quiz title in Interact, this is what my quiz progress looks like so far:

writing a quiz

It took me about three minutes to write a quiz description along with customizing my quiz title and call-to-action button. It took another two minutes to find a stock photo after searching for one of Interact’s many “social media” stock images by clicking the “Edit Cover Image” button. Not bad!

Ready to make your own personality quiz? Get started today!

Brainstorm potential quiz questions

With your quiz goals, topic, and title solidified, you’re able to start brainstorming questions for your personality quiz. First, let’s go over quiz question types so you know what you’ll be writing.

Multiple-choice questions are arguably the most common quiz question type. When you ask a multiple-choice question , you will also give your audience a few predetermined answers they can choose from based on what feels like the best fit.

Multiple answer questions give your audience the opportunity to choose as many answers as they’d like. This quiz question type is perfect if one of your goals is to collect audience data and you don’t want to limit your audience from choosing more answers. Multiple answer questions are usually indicated with a “Choose all that apply” note at the top so your audience knows what kind of question they are answering.

You can also write true and false questions if you want to create an assessment or scoring quiz . We’ll focus the rest of this article on crafting a personality quiz, but those are also options within the Interact platform.

Including a mixture of quiz question types will allow you to keep things fresh and exciting for your quiz taker. You can switch it up every few questions so there’s a bit of variety.

When you start to brainstorm questions, DON’T worry about what answers you are going to put down for each one just yet. That will only distract you from coming up with great questions.

You also don’t have to worry about the order of your questions in this stage. Treat this as a “brain dump” and put all of your ideas in a Google Doc. You can always cut questions and reorganize them later.

Once you have a list of question ideas, put them into three categories:

  • Questions that are based on your topic or niche
  • Questions that are based on what you want to know (this is great for collecting data!)
  • Questions that are based on what you think would be fun to ask

Here’s what I mean.

Of course the quiz I create won’t have this many quiz questions. Can you imagine how much it would take to go through a quiz this big? Instead, I recommend you choose six to ten quiz questions so you don’t run the risk of your audience starting the quiz but not finishing it.

It’s best to choose around four to six questions that are based on your topic, one or two questions about what you want to know in order to collect data, and one question that’s just for fun. You can see a condensed version of this here .

If I’m narrowing down what questions I want to use in my Savvy Social Media Style quiz, I might choose some of the following.

You might notice that I reordered them based on what works best with the natural progression of the quiz. Overall, I recommend collecting your data with the first or second question, ending with a fun question to keep things light-hearted, and packing a lot of value in between with topic-based questions.

Now that you have your questions, it’s time to write your quiz answers, right?

Well, not quite.

I want to make sure you don’t miss a crucial step in between.

It’s going to make the quiz question and answer writing process SO much easier.

Create personality quiz results

Why should you create personality results for your quiz before you write answers to your questions? Isn’t that the logical next step?

If you don’t have your quiz personality results nailed down, you won’t know how many answer options you need to create. Answers will also be harder to create because you won’t know how each answer influences what result the quiz taker receives after completing the quiz.

Knowing what your quiz results will be before you write the answers ensures that all of your answers actually tie into a result. It’s the best way to strategically write your quiz answers. It may feel backwards, but it’s the best way to make sure you don’t have to make edits to your answers later on because your quiz results change the way you word things.

As you start the process of creating your quiz results, here are a few things to keep in mind.

Best practices for writing personality quiz results

When writing your quiz results , it’s important to have a minimum of three to five personality results. If you have too many results, you could run the risk of overcomplicating your quiz or giving your audience too many answer options to choose from. If you have too few results, your descriptions will be too broad and won’t feel like a personalized fit for your audience.

Each quiz result should be written the person’s personality type in mind. You can start by writing three to four sentences for each personality description. This should be enough space to share what makes each quiz personality type unique and offer next steps.

(PS: If you want to create longer personality descriptions, think about creating a separate landing page with more information. TONIC Site Shop and Kate Putnam are great examples of how to do this really well.)

Here are a few things you can include in the personality description:

  • personality traits that make each type unique
  • likes and dislikes that characterize each type
  • strengths and weaknesses of each type
  • lightly introduce possible solutions to their struggles

writing a quiz

When writing descriptions for your personality quiz, keep them specific and tailored to each type you’ve created. The more broad your writing is, the more lackluster it will feel. You want to make sure each personality result feels complete on its own and different from other options.

You also want to write your personality descriptions in a way that feels light-hearted and positive. If you spend too much time pointing out their weaknesses or focusing on the negatives, you might run the risk of turning off your audience.

People take online quizzes because they want to have a fun, enjoyable, and interactive experience . This doesn’t happen unless you use your personality descriptions to highlight all of the good qualities in each personality type. Remind each type of their unique gifts and strengths that differ from other types. Everyone likes to feel special!

You’ll also want to write in a way that is authoritative, self-assured, and confident. When someone receives their personality description, you don’t want to sound wishy-washy by saying “You might be someone who likes [fill-in-the-blank].” Instead, lead with something that sounds more like “As a [Personality type here], you are someone who likes [fill-in-the-blank].”

Personality descriptions should also offer insights into each quiz taker’s mindset, motivations, and habits. When you are able to highlight why a quiz taker thinks in a certain way or exactly how they approach a relevant situation, you’ll make them feel like you truly know them.

People feel more confident in making purchases when they feel like they can trust what the other person is telling them. Helping them feel understood is one of the best ways you can create a stronger connection with your audience.

Once you’ve earned their trust, you’ll want to use action-oriented language that leads your quiz takers to the call-to-action (CTA) button . In our Interact quiz building platform , you can add a button at the end of your personality description to take your audience to the next step.

Your CTA button can lead to a services page, a product sales page, a PDF guide with more information on their personality quiz type, or any number of things. If you’re not sure what it should lead to, revisit the goals you set for yourself in the first steps of this article and see what CTA fits best.

You can also add in some humor! Don’t try to force humor if it doesn’t fit with your brand voice or your audience, but if wit and charm are a big part of your brand, your personality descriptions are the perfect place to show it off!

To summarize, your personality quiz descriptions should be:

  • Authoritative
  • Action-oriented
  • Funny (optional)

Need some extra inspiration for writing your personality descriptions? Here are a few personality result descriptions you’ll love from a wide variety of Interact users.

writing a quiz

A step-by-step guide to writing your personality quiz results

Now it’s your turn!

Take some time to map out what your three to five personality results will be.

I’ll start by creating a personality type outline of my own. You can follow along as you let your creative juices flow and determine what personality types are the best fit with your quiz.

When thinking about what personality types I wanted to include, I knew that using adjectives in the title for each personality type would help my audience understand what their unique visual aesthetic was at a quick glance.

It was important for me to choose personality results that fit with each social media graphic template. Since my quiz goal is to sell more graphic templates, I want to make sure the style of each template matches at least one of the personality results. This makes selling easy when it comes time to recommend templates to those who take the quiz. 

Naturally, someone who gets the “Glitz & Glam” result will be looking for a different social media graphic template than someone who gets the “Bright & Bold” result. This is why it helps to have personality results that are very different from each other. When there is less overlap, it will make the process of creating your quiz answers and personality descriptions much easier.

Back to the personality results. Now that you know what factors typically go into personality descriptions, let’s break down what it can look like for one of the quiz results.

Adding more details to each type helps you when you go to create your personality descriptions. You can even pull excerpts straight from your list! 

Now that you know what makes each personality type unique, you can create a short personality description for your chosen personality type. Here is what I wrote for Bright & Bold.

Let’s break down why this personality description works:

  • The first sentence starts with what the personality result is and introduces the first trait of someone who is Bright & Bold.
  • Then I talk about what this personality result is known for by their family and friends, appealing to how they want to make their mark on the world.
  • To help them feel even more understood, I take a weakness that the world sees (not being willing to fit in a box) and turn it into a positive by saying they “don’t mind coloring outside the lines.”
  • Then I relate these signature personality traits to the kind of social media presence they are dying to have.
  • I end the paragraph by lightly mentioning that I’ve created a social media graphic template that can help the Bright & Bold personality type accomplish their goal, which is to make a statement.

You can take this same strategy and use it to create your own personality descriptions. Once you write one personality description, the others will come easily now that you know the general outline of what needs to be included.

Now that I have the rest of the personality results created, I can put them into the Interact platform. Here is what it looks like so far.

Quiz result description with kaleidoscope of colors

Since I have the ability to add an image to the personality description, I went with a stock photo that has bright colors with a pattern that looks like a kaleidoscope. If I wanted to use this image as a place to show a preview of the social media graphic template I’m selling, I could do that as well, but for this example, I’ll use this stock photo.

I also added a CTA button at the bottom that says “Buy the Template for $19,” but you can also replace the language with other action-oriented copy. You can customize the color of the button, but I recommend keeping it simple, choosing a bright shade, and making sure the color fits within your visual branding guidelines .

It took me about 15-20 minutes to write out the outline and description for each personality type and another five minutes to implement it into the Interact quiz building platform. It’s coming together smoothly!

Create possible quiz answers for each personality result

The final step we’ve all been waiting for. With your personality quiz results in mind, you can write quiz answers that will perfectly pair with each result.

Remember the list of questions you previously wrote down? You’ll need those in a second.

Until then, let’s talk about what goes into a great quiz answer.

In the Interact platform, you can choose to add photos to your answers or keep them simple with plain text. We recommend including photos in your answers when possible because it makes your quiz more visually appealing.

Imagery also communicates what your answer is about when your audience quickly skims through your quiz. It makes the most relevant answer jump out, helping them more easily find the answer they’re looking for.

writing a quiz

After reviewing our top 100 most viewed Interact quizzes , we found that 90% of them had image-based answers. That’s a huge percentage!

Does this mean you have to include imagery with every answer option? Not necessarily, but it can improve your audience’s overall experience when taking your quiz.

If you want to switch it up, you can also add a main image to your question (like the example below) if you don’t want to have images for every single answer. It will save you time while still allowing you to make a statement by including images. ( Chanteuse Marie’s quiz is a great example of using both image-based quiz questions and answers .)

writing a quiz

Let’s talk about answer length.

While you might think being more descriptive in your answers helps your audience choose the best fit, it’s better to keep your quiz answers concise. If your answers are long, your audience will feel like they’re spending too much time reading through your answer options rather than moving quickly through the quiz.

You can add more descriptive detail in your quiz results, a follow-up email sequence , or a quiz-specific landing page. It doesn’t belong in the answers themselves. Try to keep your answers to 10-15 words maximum.

Your answers are also the perfect place to add an extra pop of personality! If you have catch phrases or slang that you love using, you can write in that style.

In Jenna Kutcher’s quiz , she writes her answers in a way that connects with her target audience of Millennial content creators and entrepreneurs but gives a nod to her natural speaking voice. Since she is known for taking more serious business topics and turning them into a casual conversation, it makes sense that she writes her quiz in the same way.

In this quiz question example, we see that she uses the word “moolah” instead of saying “money,” uses “rockin’” instead of “rocking,” and addresses her audience as “y’all” in one of the answers. You can see her personality is in full force with this quiz.

writing a quiz

Now all that’s left on your to-do list is to write your own quiz answers.

The easiest way to do this is to take it one question at a time and keep your personality types top-of-mind as you brainstorm answer options.

I like doing this in Google Docs because then I can strategically highlight which answer goes with each personality type so I’m always aware of how everything connects. (This comes in handy later when we put it into Interact.)

I do the same with all of my quiz copywriting clients . After we define their quiz personality types, then we put them into a color-coded key while creating potential answers for each question within the Google Doc. Here’s an example of what I mean.

writing a quiz

You’ll do the same process for the rest of your questions and alternate the order of each answer depending on what its corresponding personality type is. Once you get all the way through your questions, you can put them into Interact.

Here’s the easy four-step process of what you’ll need to do next:

  • Copy and paste your question into the question title
  • Decide whether or not you want to add images to the full question or each answer
  • Copy and paste your answers into the text boxes
  • Choose stock photos or upload your own imagery

writing a quiz

But we won’t stop there!

After you’ve put in all of your questions and answers, it’s time to go through each one within the Interact platform and connect each answer with a specific quiz result. You’ll do this by clicking the button that says “Edit Result Correlation” on the right-hand side.

This will open a screen that looks similar to the screenshot below that will allow you to connect each of the answer options with the correct quiz results. To do this, you’ll first click a specific answer to highlight it in blue, and then you’ll choose the corresponding quiz result that it will point to.

writing a quiz

This makes sure that the quiz gives your audience a specific result based on what they answered. This is what we call your quiz logic , and it’s one of the most important steps in the whole process so don’t skip it.

Once you do this for all of your answers and results, you can preview your quiz and take it a few times to make sure you are getting the accurate results. If you’ve connected each answer to a quiz result, it’s time to publish your quiz!

Publishing your quiz questions and answers in Interact

We can’t wait to see what kind of quiz you create!

By now, you’ve already written all of your quiz questions and answers along with your personality quiz descriptions. All that’s left is to embed the quiz on your website and promote it on social media.

What is the best quiz for you business?

Quizzes are super effective for lead generation and selling products. Find the best quiz for your business by answering a few questions.

Center for Teaching

Writing good multiple choice test questions, constructing an effective stem, constructing effective alternatives.

  • Additional Guidelines for Multiple Choice Questions

Considerations for Writing Multiple Choice Items that Test Higher-order Thinking

Additional resources.

Multiple choice test questions, also known as items, can be an effective and efficient way to assess learning outcomes. Multiple choice test items have several potential advantages:

writing a quiz

Reliability: Reliability is defined as the degree to which a test consistently measures a learning outcome. Multiple choice test items are less susceptible to guessing than true/false questions, making them a more reliable means of assessment. The reliability is enhanced when the number of MC items focused on a single learning objective is increased. In addition, the objective scoring associated with multiple choice test items frees them from problems with scorer inconsistency that can plague scoring of essay questions.

Validity: Validity is the degree to which a test measures the learning outcomes it purports to measure. Because students can typically answer a multiple choice item much more quickly than an essay question, tests based on multiple choice items can typically focus on a relatively broad representation of course material, thus increasing the validity of the assessment.

The key to taking advantage of these strengths, however, is construction of good multiple choice items.

A multiple choice item consists of a problem, known as the stem, and a list of suggested solutions, known as alternatives. The alternatives consist of one correct or best alternative, which is the answer, and incorrect or inferior alternatives, known as distractors.

writing a quiz

1. The stem should be meaningful by itself and should present a definite problem. A stem that presents a definite problem allows a focus on the learning outcome. A stem that does not present a clear problem, however, may test students’ ability to draw inferences from vague descriptions rather serving as a more direct test of students’ achievement of the learning outcome.

writing a quiz

2. The stem should not contain irrelevant material , which can decrease the reliability and the validity of the test scores (Haldyna and Downing 1989).

irr-material

3. The stem should be negatively stated only when significant learning outcomes require it. Students often have difficulty understanding items with negative phrasing (Rodriguez 1997). If a significant learning outcome requires negative phrasing, such as identification of dangerous laboratory or clinical practices, the negative element should be emphasized with italics or capitalization.

writing a quiz

4. The stem should be a question or a partial sentence. A question stem is preferable because it allows the student to focus on answering the question rather than holding the partial sentence in working memory and sequentially completing it with each alternative (Statman 1988). The cognitive load is increased when the stem is constructed with an initial or interior blank, so this construction should be avoided.

writing a quiz

1. All alternatives should be plausible. The function of the incorrect alternatives is to serve as distractors,which should be selected by students who did not achieve the learning outcome but ignored by students who did achieve the learning outcome. Alternatives that are implausible don’t serve as functional distractors and thus should not be used. Common student errors provide the best source of distractors.

writing a quiz

2. Alternatives should be stated clearly and concisely. Items that are excessively wordy assess students’ reading ability rather than their attainment of the learning objective

writing a quiz

3. Alternatives should be mutually exclusive. Alternatives with overlapping content may be considered “trick” items by test-takers, excessive use of which can erode trust and respect for the testing process.

writing a quiz

4. Alternatives should be homogenous in content. Alternatives that are heterogeneous in content can provide cues to student about the correct answer.

writing a quiz

5. Alternatives should be free from clues about which response is correct. Sophisticated test-takers are alert to inadvertent clues to the correct answer, such differences in grammar, length, formatting, and language choice in the alternatives. It’s therefore important that alternatives

  • have grammar consistent with the stem.
  • are parallel in form.
  • are similar in length.
  • use similar language (e.g., all unlike textbook language or all like textbook language).

6. The alternatives “all of the above” and “none of the above” should not be used. When “all of the above” is used as an answer, test-takers who can identify more than one alternative as correct can select the correct answer even if unsure about other alternative(s). When “none of the above” is used as an alternative, test-takers who can eliminate a single option can thereby eliminate a second option. In either case, students can use partial knowledge to arrive at a correct answer.

7. The alternatives should be presented in a logical order (e.g., alphabetical or numerical) to avoid a bias toward certain positions.

writing a quiz

8. The number of alternatives can vary among items as long as all alternatives are plausible. Plausible alternatives serve as functional distractors, which are those chosen by students that have not achieved the objective but ignored by students that have achieved the objective. There is little difference in difficulty, discrimination, and test score reliability among items containing two, three, and four distractors.

Additional Guidelines

1. Avoid complex multiple choice items , in which some or all of the alternatives consist of different combinations of options. As with “all of the above” answers, a sophisticated test-taker can use partial knowledge to achieve a correct answer.

writing a quiz

2. Keep the specific content of items independent of one another. Savvy test-takers can use information in one question to answer another question, reducing the validity of the test.

When writing multiple choice items to test higher-order thinking, design questions that focus on higher levels of cognition as defined by Bloom’s taxonomy . A stem that presents a problem that requires application of course principles, analysis of a problem, or evaluation of alternatives is focused on higher-order thinking and thus tests students’ ability to do such thinking. In constructing multiple choice items to test higher order thinking, it can also be helpful to design problems that require multilogical thinking, where multilogical thinking is defined as “thinking that requires knowledge of more than one fact to logically and systematically apply concepts to a …problem” (Morrison and Free, 2001, page 20). Finally, designing alternatives that require a high level of discrimination can also contribute to multiple choice items that test higher-order thinking.

writing a quiz

  • Burton, Steven J., Sudweeks, Richard R., Merrill, Paul F., and Wood, Bud. How to Prepare Better Multiple Choice Test Items: Guidelines for University Faculty, 1991.
  • Cheung, Derek and Bucat, Robert. How can we construct good multiple-choice items? Presented at the Science and Technology Education Conference, Hong Kong, June 20-21, 2002.
  • Haladyna, Thomas M. Developing and validating multiple-choice test items, 2 nd edition. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1999.
  • Haladyna, Thomas M. and Downing, S. M.. Validity of a taxonomy of multiple-choice item-writing rules. Applied Measurement in Education , 2(1), 51-78, 1989.
  • Morrison, Susan and Free, Kathleen. Writing multiple-choice test items that promote and measure critical thinking. Journal of Nursing Education 40: 17-24, 2001.

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7 Tips for Writing the Best Quiz Questions

3 minute read

writing a quiz

Marketing Sales Second Street Blog Admin & Tech Marketing Objectives Quiz Types

How to write the best personality quizzes

When you are creating a personality quiz, one of the most important – and most challenging – elements is the questions. You want to make a quiz that’s both fun to take and sure to be a hit.

All of the examples shown in this article are from a quiz called “What Kind of Bride Are You?”

Get your copy of our Quiz Playbook for more quiz ideas and case studies »

Aim for 7 questions..

With 7 questions, your quiz is long enough to cover the subject but quick enough to be easily completed. To make sure all 7 questions are the best they can be, start by brainstorming 14 questions and then eliminate any that aren’t fun, are too difficult, or don’t correlate well with your outcomes.

Keep it short and simple.

Questions shouldn’t require too much thought to answer and should be kept to just a simple sentence. As for answers, one word is best, but 2-4 word phrases are OK in moderation.

writing a quiz

Don’t make your questions too obvious.

If you are writing a quiz about what car you should drive, don’t make one of the questions, “What kind of car do you want?” While that may be an extreme example, you should make sure that none of your questions or answers point too obviously to a particular outcome. Also, keep in mind that your questions don’t necessarily need to be related to the topic of the quiz. As long as the question has a purpose and helps lead to an outcome, it can be about anything.

writing a quiz

Pay attention to the order of your questions.

To capture people’s attention, start your quiz with your second-most exciting question. Then finish it off with the most exciting to go out with a bang. Keep the most difficult questions that might require more thought in the middle, so that by the time people get to them they are already committed.

writing a quiz

Have a consistent number of answers.

Each question you write should have the same number of answers, unless you have a specific reason for changing that number (i.e. a Yes or No answer). Aim for between 4-6 answers per question. You should also make an effort to vary the punch line – sometimes put the funniest answer at the end while other times lead with it.

Make sure there’s an answer for everyone.

When you are writing the answers, make them all uniquely different and cover the full spectrum of options. No one wants to be forced to pick an answer that doesn’t work for them. One useful strategy is to think of your answers in terms of high, medium, low, and no interest. One answer is for someone extremely interested in the topic, one is for someone with average interest, one is for someone mildly interested, and one is for someone with no interest in the topic at all.

writing a quiz

Be careful with pop culture references.

When you are considering using a pop culture reference in your quiz (i.e. “Who is your favorite sitcom character?”), first consider your target audience – will they get these references? People might give up on your quiz if they don’t understand the question, so be sure all of the people or characters you include are widely recognizable.

writing a quiz

The most important thing to remember when creating a quiz is to leave time for testing. Send your completed quiz around to your friends, coworkers, and family members and make sure they enjoy the process of taking it and are happy with their outcomes before you make it public.

Next best reads for you

  • Blog 5 Tips for Building Great Personality Quizzes

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7 Tips for Writing the Best Quiz Questions

writing a quiz

by Liz Huff Second Street

writing a quiz

Question: Who writes the best personality quizzes? Answer: You, after reading this article.

When you are creating a personality quiz, one of the most important – and most challenging – elements is the questions. You want to make a quiz that’s both fun to take and sure to be a hit.

All of the examples shown in this article are from a quiz called “What Kind of Bride Are You?”

Get your copy of our Quiz Playbook for more quiz ideas and case studies »

Aim for 7 questions..

With 7 questions, your quiz is long enough to cover the subject but quick enough to be easily completed. To make sure all 7 questions are the best they can be, start by brainstorming 14 questions and then eliminate any that aren’t fun, are too difficult, or don’t correlate well with your outcomes.

Keep it short and simple.

Questions shouldn’t require too much thought to answer and should be kept to just a simple sentence. As for answers, one word is best, but 2-4 word phrases are OK in moderation.

writing a quiz

Don’t make your questions too obvious.

If you are writing a quiz about what car you should drive, don’t make one of the questions, “What kind of car do you want?” While that may be an extreme example, you should make sure that none of your questions or answers point too obviously to a particular outcome. Also, keep in mind that your questions don’t necessarily need to be related to the topic of the quiz. As long as the question has a purpose and helps lead to an outcome, it can be about anything.

writing a quiz

Pay attention to the order of your questions.

To capture people’s attention, start your quiz with your second-most exciting question. Then finish it off with the most exciting to go out with a bang. Keep the most difficult questions that might require more thought in the middle, so that by the time people get to them they are already committed.

writing a quiz

Have a consistent number of answers.

Each question you write should have the same number of answers, unless you have a specific reason for changing that number (i.e. a Yes or No answer). Aim for between 4-6 answers per question. You should also make an effort to vary the punch line – sometimes put the funniest answer at the end while other times lead with it.

Make sure there’s an answer for everyone.

When you are writing the answers, make them all uniquely different and cover the full spectrum of options. No one wants to be forced to pick an answer that doesn’t work for them. One useful strategy is to think of your answers in terms of high, medium, low, and no interest. One answer is for someone extremely interested in the topic, one is for someone with average interest, one is for someone mildly interested, and one is for someone with no interest in the topic at all.

writing a quiz

Be careful with pop culture references.

When you are considering using a pop culture reference in your quiz (i.e. “Who is your favorite sitcom character?”), first consider your target audience – will they get these references? People might give up on your quiz if they don’t understand the question, so be sure all of the people or characters you include are widely recognizable.

writing a quiz

The most important thing to remember when creating a quiz is to leave time for testing. Send your completed quiz around to your friends, coworkers, and family members and make sure they enjoy the process of taking it and are happy with their outcomes before you make it public.

Get your copy of the Quiz Playbook.

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How to Write Quiz Questions for Training: 14 Tips

How to Write Quiz Questions for Training: 14 Tips

Corey Bleich

🍿 7 min. read

Many of us remember the nerve-wracking, pencil-tapping anguish of taking the SATs or the nail-biting wait for the results of a learner’s permit test. The idea of taking a quiz or test as an adult may have many of us breaking out in a cold sweat, but it doesn't have to be that way. If you are in charge of developing quizzes for employee training programs, writing great questions yields more accurate results, greater compliance tracking, and better knowledge retention among learners. These are our tips on how to write quiz questions.

🔍 What you’ll find in this post

  • Why good quiz questions matter
  • Tips for how to write quiz questions
  • Where to find help

Who needs a quiz anyway?

If you thought quizzes were in the rearview mirror of high school or your undergraduate career, think again. So who needs a quiz?

  • Employees who may be called upon to display their understanding of key topics for compliance and safety reasons
  • People in the process of gaining certifications or licenses
  • Professionals upskilling in their field who need additional support to retain information

When building eLearning courses, quiz questions are a quick and easy way to gauge what a person knows — and what they still need to learn.

Why good questions matter

You may be designing quiz questions for adults, but nothing elicits eyerolls faster than irrelevant, repetitive quiz questions riddled with typos or spelling errors. Adult learners can be some of the most enthusiastic — or the most judgmental — when it comes to a poorly designed quiz.

The bottom line is this: if you are really interested in seeing what your employees know, understand, and can do, you’ll need to ask the questions that give you the clearest insight into where they are in their learning journey. The best questions build and reinforce their understanding of key concepts, and test their deeper critical thinking skills.

How to write quiz questions

Ready to get started? Here’s how to write quiz questions for employee training programs.

1. Define your learning objectives

Before writing quiz questions, clearly outline the learning objectives you want to achieve. These learning objectives are a roadmap for creating the content of your eLearning course, ensuring that you teach and then test their understanding on those objectives you lay out. This helps you create focused and relevant questions that test learners' understanding of something specific.

Developing the right learning objectives is an art in and of itself, so we’ve created a guide to get started with Carrie Lewis Miller, instructional designer with IT Solutions at Minnesota State University, Mankato, and Quincy Conley, the Director of the Teaching & Learning Center at A.T. Still University.

👉 Learn more : Read our full eBook on how to define your learning objectives here

2. Vary question types

If your quiz takers are habitually picking “C,” it’s time to shake things up. Most people can learn a few strategies to accurately guess in a multiple-choice or multiple-correct quiz, but this yields no meaningful results. Randomizing answer options in these types of quiz questions is an easy way to focus learners on selecting the best answers and not just their quiz taking strategy.

Another way to prevent guessing and actually see what learners know is to use a mix of question types that may include:

  • True or false
  • Fill-in-the-blank
  • If-then scenarios
  • Sorting into categories

This keeps the quiz engaging and tests different aspects of the learners' knowledge. Writing different types of eLearning quiz questions doesn’t take much longer, and it produces results that more accurately reflect what learners know.

3. Avoid jargon, slang, and (too much) humor

One of the most important things to know about how to write quiz questions is that the words and tone matter.

Unless you are testing a person’s understanding of actual jargon (words that are specific to a field or process), keep the insider chatter to a minimum.

You don’t want quiz takers to be so confused by the language that they don’t understand the question. This doesn’t mean you need to “dumb it down,” but it does mean that quizzes should not be checking if learners can understand the context of the question instead of uncovering if they actually know the answer.

Same goes for slang and too much timely humor. If you are in an industry that is constantly changing, thus necessitating frequent quiz updates, these might be more appropriate. But skip it in industries that are less changeable.

4. Limit the number of choices

As in life, sometimes people get paralyzed by too many choices on a quiz. If you decide to use multiple-choice or multiple-correct questions, offer only three to five answer options. Having too many choices can overwhelm learners and make the quiz unnecessarily difficult.

Offer only three to five answer options in multiple-choice questions

5. Keep your questions and answers concise

When writing quiz questions, focus on wording your questions and answers concisely. Too much wording clutters the screen and quickly becomes overwhelming for learners. Scrolling through questions can make it easy to lose the point. And, for those using assistive listening devices, each answer can be a chore to listen through.

This is also important to make development easier. Too many choices, long answers, and long paragraphs of questions can all break your course templates and require re-work for design.

6. Make all choices plausible

Again, just like life, all choices on a multiple-choice or multiple-correct quiz should be plausible. This forces learners to think critically and truly understand the material.

Your quiz is not meant to trick the quiz taker. You’re not trying to trip them up by changing one single word or mixing correct parts of an answer with an incorrect choice. But you do want to write challenging questions that make people think about their answer.

7. Balance the level of difficulty

Create a mix of easy, moderate, and difficult questions targeted to learners of varying skill levels and to maintain engagement.

One way to do this is by incorporating adaptive quizzes into your design. AI programs can automatically order quiz questions by difficulty. They can adapt which question they offer as the quiz taker progresses. If someone is whipping through and getting every answer correct, the program can up the difficulty accordingly.

Alternatively, many development tools will allow you to set the weight of questions in the final results. Easy questions get a smaller score when answered correctly, harder questions are weighted to earn more points.

👉 Learn more : Find out how to use AI tools to create your eLearning materials

8. Avoid negative phrasing

If you’ve ever been annoyed by a double negative that’s actually not not positive (like that right there), make sure to avoid it in your quiz design. This can be seen as sneaky and is certain to set up the wrong mood for learning.

This sort of quiz question is also a definite holdover from your high school days. It tests if the quiz taker is paying attention, not if they know the material. Do everyone a favor and assume your quiz takers are attentive.

9. Test application, not just recall

Good test takers know strategies that can improve their chances of getting the correct answer — even if they don’t know it. We all know that one person who gets 100% on a quiz testing “ How Pittsburgh Are You ” when the whole office knows they are native Californians. This is all about test-taking strategies.

Prevent this by writing questions that test learners' ability to apply concepts and problem-solve, rather than just memorizing facts (or using test-taking strategies to get the answer).

10. Distractor quality matters

Distractors are incorrect answers designed to throw quiz takers off track and make them pay attention to all choices. They could be mistaken for the correct answer by someone who does not fully understand the material.

These are difficult to write without seeming condescending or foolish. Take the time to write high-quality distractors that are not insulting or overly ridiculous, but rather dive into the nuance of your employee training topic.

11. Use real-world scenarios

Real-world scenarios are the quiz-taking equivalent of on-the-job training. These can be created from actual events that have occurred in your industry, which makes them more relevant. Placing your user in the driver’s seat, and making them think through how to handle a situation is a great way to ensure they’re engaged.

👉 Learn more : Discover how to write excellent scenario-based training

12. Randomize question order

When learners have the option of retaking a quiz for a higher score, go ahead and randomize the question and/or answer order during their next pass. This reduces the risk of learners memorizing the order of questions and answers.

And yes, adults are prime examples of people who do this. It’s a time-saving trick that is ultimately unhelpful if you want them to actually know what you're quizzing on.

13. Proofread and review

If you have ever witnessed the bloodbath that ensues online when someone makes a simple grammatical or spelling error in a meme, you’ll go through your quiz with a fine-toothed comb to catch all gaffes before you go live.

Don’t forget to check the clarity, accuracy, and relevance of all your info, too. The wrong spelling or word can signal an incorrect answer for testers, even though you’ve marked it correct. And if it’s not relevant to those original learning objectives you set up at the beginning, the best case is your learners will be annoyed with you, and worst, they’ll focus on retaining insignificant information.

14. Solicit feedback

It’s normal if you don't get writing a quiz right the first time. Ask colleagues or subject matter experts to review your quiz questions and provide feedback on their clarity, difficulty, and effectiveness in testing the learning objectives.

15. Analyze and iterate

Inevitably, some of your quizzes themselves will fail. Questions will be confusing, or they won't match learning objectives closely enough. After the quiz has been taken by a large pool of employees, analyze the results to identify areas where learners struggled or excelled, and use this information to refine your questions and improve future quizzes.

TL;DR: Creating a good quiz is tough

Knowing how to write questions for employee training is challenging. At EdgePoint, our team of instructional designers can guide you through the process or create great quizzes based on your learning materials. Whether you’re trying to update a few modules or create a learning plan from the ground up, we’re here to help.

We know how to write quiz questions. Get in touch today to find support!

Let’s create something exceptional. Talk to our team today.

Instructional design Elearning

12 minute read

Boost Online Learning Engagement With Quiz Variety

Claudia Buckley

Claudia Buckley

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If you're ever involved in creating an online training course , you will find that using a variety of quiz question types for your elearning course is an excellent way to add interactivity and increase learner engagement. Incorporating different types of questions allows you to test learners' understanding of the content in different ways, and it also makes learning more enjoyable.

But does this mean you should just randomly throw in different types of questions in the hope that this will somehow make your course more exciting? Uh, no. It doesn't quite work that way. You'll still need to put in the work to make your content interesting by using techniques that have been proven to aid in learner engagement and retention, such as gamification, microlearning elements , and social learning. 

But even high-quality courses won't do much good if you have a bunch of repetitive or poorly written quiz questions. You can end up boring, frustrating, or even misleading your learners if the question type, stem, and answers aren't properly thought out and executed. So here is your guide to best practices when writing quiz questions for elearning courses.

learner engagement

✔  Multiple choice questions

✔  Multiple select questions

✔  True or false questions

✔  Fill in the blanks questions

✔  Matching questions

How to create a quiz using the GoSkills Course Builder

To add a quiz block to your lesson:

  • Click “Add content block” and choose the Quiz block. 
  • Click  Edit quiz to choose the question type and add details.
  • Click the plus ➕ icon and choose the question type you want to add.

1. Best practices for writing multiple-choice questions

With multiple-choice questions, there are at least two choices, and the learner is only allowed to select one.

In writing good multiple-choice questions, remember that the goal should be to challenge students while still allowing them to succeed. This means you should:

  • Keep it simple. Avoid long or confusing questions, trick questions, and too many answer options. Try to limit the number of choices to three or four.
  • Make sure answer options do not overlap. In other words, ensure that there is only one correct answer to the question asked. 

How to do it in the GoSkills Course Builder

  • Type the question in the “Enter question title” field. You may want to provide some context for the question with a description.
  • Enter the answer options next. As mentioned before, there will be at least two answer options, but most multiple choice questions have three or four choices. You can add more by clicking “Add another answer”.

multiple choice quiz

  • As the quiz creator, you'll need to identify the correct answer by clicking the radio button next to that option. An example is shown below.

multiple choice quiz

2. Best practices for writing multiple-select questions

Multiple select questions allow the learner to select more than one checkbox from the available options. Use this type of question when:

  • A question has several correct answers , for example, "Which of the following are classified as insects?"
  • You want to test that the learner knows all the elements that make up a composite answer, for example, the various steps that make up a process.
  • The learner must select all the right options for their answer to be marked correct. 

How to do it in the GoSkills Course Builder 

  • Type the question in the “Enter question title” field. You can add an explanation just below the question.
  • Enter the answer options next. The default is two answer options, but you can add more by clicking “Add another answer”.

multiple select quiz

  • Identify the correct answers by ticking the checkboxes next to those options.

multiple select quiz

3. Best practices for writing true or false questions

True or false questions ask the learner to decide whether the statement is true or false. Here are some tips for writing effective true or false quiz questions:

  • Do not simply copy-paste from the course material. Instead, use statements that test understanding of the content by rephrasing the true/false statement.
  • Use negative statements sparingly , for example, "True/False: The sky is not blue." Negative true or false questions add significant cognitive load to the learner and may result in them guessing the answer rather than learning and knowledge retention.
  • Consider using images, videos, and situational questions. Combining these elements with true or false statements will make learning more interesting and help learners process what they are learning in a variety of ways.

How to do it in the GoSkills Course Builder  

  • The ‘True’ and ‘False’ options will automatically be displayed.

true false quiz

4. Best practices for writing fill in the blank questions

These question types are typically sentences with one, two, or three words missing and require that the learner type the missing word(s) in the blank space(s) provided. Good fill-in-the-blank questions generally have the following elements:

  • Only one possible answer for each blank. When blanks have multiple possible correct answers, this can cause learner frustration.
  • Account for variations in spelling and representation , for example, "center/centre", "twenty/20", "dollars/$", etc.   

The default question, as shown below, provides an example of what a fill-in-the-blank question might look like.

fill in the blanks quiz

  • Type the question stem, omitting the words you want the learner to input. 
  • To add a new blank, place the cursor where you want it to appear, then click the ‘Add a blank’ option.

fill in the blanks quiz

  • Once saved, the number of acceptable words or phrases for that blank will be indicated by a number while you are in Creator mode.

fill in the blanks quiz

5. Best practices for writing matching questions

Matching questions ask the learner to pair items in one column to the correct option in another column by dragging on the answer options. Bear the following in mind when writing matching questions:

  • Matching questions are useful for identifying relationships between items, for example, a list of inventions in one column and a list of inventors in the second column.
  • State clearly what the learner is matching. For example, the question stem might say, "Match the capital cities on the right to their countries on the left."

matching questions

  • For the first option, type the first part of an answer you want the learner to see in the left column. In the right column of the same option, type the second part of that answer.
  • Repeat the above for the second option.
  • The default is two options, but you can add more by clicking “Add another answer”. 

matching questions

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Do more with your elearning quiz 

Apart from the type of question you choose, it's worth exploring what options your course authoring tool provides for modifying the behavior of the quiz. In order to improve the learner experience, the GoSkills Course Builder offers several features that you can customize for each quiz block. 

Add extra design elements to a quiz question

You can add even more variety to specific quiz questions by clicking on their 3-dot menu. Maybe you’d like to: 

  • add an image that your learner should reference to answer the question.
  • add a hint to help the learner decide on the correct answer.
  • explain the correct answer which your learner will see at the end of the quiz.
  • shuffle the order of the answer options each time the learner takes the quiz.

course builder

From this menu, you can also duplicate the question to make it easier to add a question of the same type and structure or delete the question.

Jazz up the entire quiz block

You can change the behavior of the entire quiz block (all the questions in that section) by hovering over the quiz block and clicking “Edit”. Then select the “Settings” tab in the “Edit quiz block” panel.

course builder

Some of the options you'll see are:

  • Require quiz. The ‘Require quiz’ setting is OFF by default, meaning that learners can choose to skip the quiz. Switching it on means that learners must attempt the quiz to move on in the course.
  • Passing score required. The ‘Passing score required’ setting is OFF by default. If switched on, you will have to enter the minimum percentage score needed to move on in the course. 
  • Reward learners with coins. The ‘Reward learners with coins’ toggle is OFF by default. If switched on, learners will get 10 GoSkills gamification coins for achieving the passing score.
  • Shuffle questions. ‘Shuffle questions’ is OFF by default. Switching it on will cause the order of the questions to change each time the quiz is attempted.
  • Show correct answers. The ‘Show correct answers’ option is ON by default. Switching it on means that the correct answers will be displayed on the results page.

man taking online quiz

Big takeaways

1. use situational questions.

These will prevent the learner from simply skimming or regurgitating the course material, but instead, think of how the knowledge can be applied in everyday settings.

2. Use mini quizzes throughout the course

Asking one or two questions after learning a key point or after a short lesson helps learners to understand what will be important to remember. It is also a good idea to include important concepts that will be tested in the final exam in a mini quiz, as this will help long-term information recall.

3. Vary the design of quiz elements 

Do not feel forced to ask the same number of questions after each lesson. It is perfectly acceptable to ask a single question if that is all the lesson calls for. Likewise, shuffling questions, answer options, and adding gamification elements will keep learners alert and engaged till the very end.

3. Use multimedia elements where possible

Adding images and videos to your quiz questions where possible will aid in comprehension and information recall and is another way of improving the visuals in your course.

4. Provide feedback

Learners will get extremely frustrated if they are not able to go through the correct answers, or at least pointed in the right direction after entering incorrect answers.

5. Make your quiz useful

This last one might seem obvious, but don't just write a quiz for the sake of writing a quiz. Consider the thought process that students will be using to arrive at the correct answer and make sure that it is productive for their learning. If your question does not aid in knowledge retention, it should likely be eliminated.

Over to you

Quiz questions are not just a way to test learners’ knowledge – they’re an important part of the learning process itself. Your L&D program should be designed with learner engagement and knowledge retention in mind. So experiment with different question types and add variety, interaction, and fun to the learning experience!

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Claudia Buckley

Claudia is a project manager and business skills instructor at GoSkills. In her spare time, she reads mystery novels and does genealogy research.

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Free online quiz maker

Make a quiz with different question types to engage students in a classroom, train employees at work, or play trivia with friends.

Used by 50 million+ people around the world

Make your own quiz with our online quiz maker

Quickly and easily create interactive online quizzes for free! With Quizizz, you can create a quiz that boosts engagement and participation with just a few clicks. Whether you’re looking to create a homework assignment for Math class, or an ice breaker to welcome new faces, there’s something here for everyone.

Quizizz for Schools 

Craft questions that enable students to identify multiple relevant areas, challenging them to think deeply about the image's elements and their relationships.

Two cheerful students are working on their laptops, while a teacher is talking to one of them and pointing at their laptop screen.

Quizizz for Work 

Make employee training and education fun with Quizizz for Work. Our online quiz maker enables you to facilitate live engagement through presentations, quizzes, and polls. Use Quizizz at work for employee onboarding, e-learning, community engagement, and more!

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Create immersive quizzes complete with images, gifs, audio clips, videos, graphs, illustrations, and so much more! Tap into 12+ question types including Multiple Choice , Drag and Drop, Fill in the Blanks , and Hotspot. With Quizizz, you can also double the fun with power-ups, music, themes, and memes. 

So Many Question Types to Choose From

In this classic activity, learners can complete sentences by filling in the blanks with the right answers.

A screen displaying a question with space to enter answer

Ask your students to reorder a set of jumbled options in ascending, descending, or chronological order.

A screen displaying four options that can be arranged in the correct order

Present learners with the opportunity to select one or more correct answers from a list of options.

A screen displaying question with an option to choose from four options

Gamify your assessment with shuffled text and images that your students can pair together.

A screen displaying question with four options to match

Choose between a plain background or an image and watch as students give shape to their thoughts with colors, highlighters, and more.

A screen displaying a question with an option to draw

Motivate learners to think critically by dragging and dropping the right options to complete a sentence.

A screen displaying a question with four options to drag and drop

Let students take center stage with video responses so you can assess their presentation skills.

A screen displaying a question with an option to video record

Check the pulse of your classroom with a fun poll or vote.

A screen displaying a question with two options to click

Use Lessons to create an instructor-led experience where slides and multimedia are combined with quiz and poll questions.

A screen displaying a slide with a picture

Engage your students’ higher order thinking skills and encourage them to dig deep with open-ended questions.

A screen displaying a question with space to write answer

Analyze speaking skills by allowing students to voice their answers using the audio response feature.

A screen displaying a question with an option to audio record

Prompt your students to choose between a set of drop-down options to fill out the blanks in a piece of text.

A screen displaying about Question type on Quizizz

How to Make a Quiz

Launch: Visit Quizizz , click on ‘Create’, and select the ‘Quiz’ option

Create: Mix and match 15 different question types including Multiple Choice, Reorder, Graphing, and Fill in the Blanks to make your own quiz, or

Search: Import existing questions from over 30M quizzes and lessons created by the Quizizz community, or

Import: Bring in quizzes from your spreadsheets or Google Forms, so you never have to start from scratch

Customize: Add images, videos, gifs, audio clips, equations, and more to your questions and answer options

Host: Choose between multiple game modes including Live, Homework, Team, Test, and Paper Mode to host your quiz and get instant results

Quickly find or create a quiz from the library

Prepare high-quality, interactive quizzes in as little as two minutes.

Browse through 30M+ activities spanning all topics and subjects

Build from scratch, copy entire activities, or make your own quiz by combining content that best meets your students’ needs.

A screen displaying the Quizizz library with a wide range of quizzes and the option to teleport questions from them

Get detailed results at your fingertips

Our online quiz maker provides the exact insights you need to make data-driven instruction a reality.

Identify and immediately adapt to your participants’ needs

See overall performance, the toughest question or topic, and individual progress

A screen displaying accuracy of a student on report

Quizizz easily integrates with your existing tools

Seamlessly integrate our online quiz maker with tools like Google Classroom, Schoology, and Canvas.

Directly share quiz links with the participants in your classroom with just a single click

Update grades and reports in the blink of an eye by syncing Quizizz with your preferred LMS

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The Write Practice

100 Writing Practice Lessons & Exercises

by Joe Bunting | 50 comments

Want to Become a Published Author? In 100 Day Book, you’ll finish your book guaranteed. Learn more and sign up here.

Want to become a better writer? Perhaps you want to write novels, or maybe you just want to get better grades in your essay writing assignments , or maybe you'd like to start a popular blog .

If you want to write better, you need practice. But what does a writing practice actually look like? In this post, I'm going to give you everything you need to kick off your writing practice and become a better writer faster.

100 Top Writing Practice Lessons and Exercises

What Is Writing Practice?

Writing practice is a method of becoming a better writer that usually involves reading lessons about the writing process, using writing prompts, doing creative writing exercises , or finishing writing pieces, like essays, short stories , novels , or books . The best writing practice is deliberate, timed, and involves feedback.

How Do You Practice Writing?

This was the question I had when I first started The Write Practice in 2011. I knew how to practice a sport and how to practice playing an instrument. But for some reason, even after studying it in college, I wasn't sure how to practice writing.

I set out to create the best writing practice I could. The Write Practice is the result.

I found that the best writing practice has three aspects:

Deliberate . Writing whatever you feel like may be cathartic, but it's not an effective way to become a better writer or build your writing skills. You'll get better faster by practicing a specific technique or aspect of the writing process each time you sit down to write.

This is why we have a new lesson about the writing process each day on The Write Practice, followed by a practice prompt at the end so you can put what you learned to use immediately.

Timed . It's no secret writers struggle with focus. There are just too many interesting distractions—Facebook, email, Kim Kardashian's Instagram feed (just kidding about that last one, sort of)—and writing is just too hard sometimes.

Setting a timer, even for just fifteen minutes, is an easy and effective way to stay focused on what's important.

This is why in our writing practice prompt at the end of each post we have a time limit, usually with a link to an online tool egg timer , so you can focus on deliberate practice without getting distracted.

Feedback . Getting feedback is one of the requirements to deliberately practice writing or any other craft. Feedback can look like listening to the reactions of your readers or asking for constructive criticism from editors and other writers.

This is why we ask you to post your writing practice after each lesson, so that you can get feedback from other writers in The Write Practice community. It's also why we set up The Write Practice Pro community , to provide critique groups for writers to get feedback on each finished piece of writing.

How to practice writing

Our 100+ Best Creative Writing Practice Exercises and Lessons

Now that you know how we practice writing at The Write Practice, here are our best writing practice lessons to jumpstart your writing skills with some daily writing exercises, for beginner writers to even the most expert writers:

All-Time, Top 10 Writing Lessons and Exercises

These ten posts are our most viewed articles to boost your writing practice:

1. What is Plot? The 6 Elements of Plot and How to Use Them . Great stories use similar elements in wildly different ways to build page-turning stories. Click here to read what they are and learn how to start using them !

2. Top 100 Short Story Ideas . Here are over a hundred writing prompts in a variety of genres. If you need ideas for your next story, check this out!

3. How To Use Neither, Nor, Or, and Nor Correctly . Even good writers struggle figuring out when to use neither/nor and either/or. In this post, our copy-queen Liz Bureman settles the confusion once and for all. Click to continue to the writing exercise

4. Ten Secrets To Write Better Stories . How does Pixar manage to create such great stories, year after year? And how do you write a good story? In this post, I distill everything I've learned about how to write a good story into ten tips. Click to continue to the writing exercise

5. 35 Questions To Ask Your Characters From Marcel Proust . To get to know my characters better, I use a list of questions known as the Proust Questionnaire, made famous by French author, Marcel Proust. Click to continue to the writing exercise

6. How a Scene List Can Change Your Novel-Writing Life . Creating a scene list changed my novel-writing life, and doing the same will change yours too. Includes examples of the scene lists from famous authors. Click to continue to the writing exercise

7. Why You Need to be Using the Oxford Comma . Most people I've met have no idea what the Oxford comma is, but it's probably something that you have used frequently in your writing. Click to continue to the writing exercise

8. Six Surprising Ways to Write Better Interview Questions.  The interview is the most-used tool in a journalist's bag. But that doesn't mean novelists, bloggers, and even students can't and don't interview people. Here's how to conduct a great interview. Click to continue to the writing exercise

9. Why You Should Try Writing in Second Person . You've probably used first person and third person point-of-view already. But what about second person? This post explains three reasons why you should try writing from this point-of-view. Click to continue to the writing exercise

10. The Secret to Show, Don't Tell . You've heard the classic writing rule, “Show. Don't Tell.” Every writing blog ever has talked about it, and for good reason. Showing, for some reason, is really difficult. Click to continue to the writing exercise.

Book Idea Worksheet

12 Exercises and Lessons To Become a Better Writer

How do you become a better writer? These posts share our best advice:

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6 Lessons and Exercises from Great Writers

If you want to be a writer, learn from the great writers who have gone before you:

  • 23 Essential Quotes from Ernest Hemingway About Writing
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12 Genre and Format Specific Writing Lessons and Exercises

Here are our best writing lessons for specific types of writing, including essays, screenplays, memoir, short stories, children's books, and humor writing:

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  • How to Write a Short Story from Start to Finish
  • How to Write a Thriller Novel
  • How to Write a Children's Book
  • How to Write a Love Story
  • How to Write a Coming of Age Story or Book
  • How to Write an Adventure Book
  • 5 Key Elements for Successful Short Stories
  • 4 Tips to Write a Novel That Will Be Adapted Into a Movie
  • Humor Writing for People Who Aren’t Funny

14 Characterization Lessons and Exercises

Good characters are the foundation of good fiction. Here are our best lessons to create better characters:

  • Character Development: How to Create Characters Audiences Will Love
  • Writing Villains: 9 Evil Examples of the Villain Archetype
  • How NOT to Introduce a New Character
  • The Strongest Form of Characterization
  • The Most Important Character Archetype
  • How Do You Build A Strong Character In Your Writing?
  • 75+ Antihero Examples and How to Use Them
  • How to Explore Your Characters’ Motivations
  • 8 Tips for Naming Characters
  • The Protagonist: How to Center Your Story
  • Heroes vs. Anti-Heroes: Which Is Right For Your Story?
  • The Weakest Form of Characterization
  • How to Write With an Accent
  • How To Create a Character Sketch Using Scrivener

15 Grammar Lessons and Exercises

I talk to so many writers, some of whom are published authors, who struggle with grammar. Here are our best writing lessons on grammar:

  • Is It Okay To End A Sentence With A Preposition?
  • Contractions List: When To Use and When To Avoid
  • Good vs. Well
  • Connotation vs. Denotation
  • Per Se vs. Per Say
  • When You SHOULD Use Passive Voice
  • When Do You Use “Quotation Marks”
  • Polysyndeton and Asyndeton: Definition and Examples
  • The Case Against Twilight
  • Affect Versus Effect
  • Stop Saying “Literally”
  • What Is a Comma Splice? And Why Do Editors Hate Them?
  • Intra vs. Inter: Why No One Plays Intermural Sports
  • Alright and Alot: Words That Are Not Words
  • The Poor, Misunderstood Semicolon

4 Journalism Lessons and Exercises

Want to be a journalist? Or even use techniques from journalism to improve your novel, essay, or screenplay? Here are our best writing lessons on journalism:

  • Six Ways to Ask Better Questions In Interviews
  • How Should You Interview Someone? Over Email? In Person?
  • What If They Don’t Want to Talk to You?
  • Eleven Habits of a Highly Effective Interviewers

16 Plot and Structure Lessons and Exercises

Want to write a good story? Our top plot and structure lessons will help:

  • The Ten Types of Story and How to Master Them
  • Points of a Story: 6 Plot Points Every Story Needs
  • How to Shape a Story: The 6 Arcs
  • 7 Keys To Write the Perfect First Line of a Novel
  • The Secret to Creating Conflict
  • 4 Tips to Avoid Having Your Short Story Rejected by a Literary Magazine
  • 7 Steps to Creating Suspense
  • 5 Elements of Storytelling
  • 3 Important Rules for Writing Endings
  • A Writer’s Cheatsheet to Plot and Structure
  • Overcoming the Monster
  • How to Satisfy Your Reader With a Great Ending
  • Pow! Boom! Ka-Pow! 5 Tips to Write Fight Scenes
  • The Dramatic Question and Suspense in Fiction
  • How to Write a Memorable Beginning and Ending
  • How to Write the Perfect First Page

6 Lessons and Exercises to Beat Writer's Block

Writer's block is real, and it can completely derail your writing. Here are six lessons to get writing again:

  • How To Write Whether You Feel Like it Or Not
  • This Fun Creative Writing Exercise Will Change Your Life
  • When You Should Be Writing But Can't…
  • What to do When Your Word Count is Too Low
  • 7 Tricks to Write More with Less Willpower
  • When You Don’t Know What to Write, Write About Your Insecurities

7 Literary Technique Lessons and Exercises

These writing and storytelling techniques will teach you a few tricks of the trade you may not have discovered before:

  • 3 Tips to “Show, Don’t Tell” Emotions and Moods
  • 3 Reasons to Write Stream of Consciousness Narrative
  • 16 Observations About Real Dialogue
  • Intertextuality As A Literary Device
  • Why You Should Use Symbolism In Your Writing
  • 6 Ways to Evoke Emotion in Poetry and Prose
  • 3 Tips To Write Modern Allegorical Novels
  • Symbol vs. Motif: What’s the Difference

3 Inspirational Writing Lessons and Exercises

Need some inspiration? Here are three of our most inspiring posts:

  • Why We Write: Four Reasons
  • You Must Remember Every Scar
  • 17 Reasons to Write Something NOW

3 Publishing Blogging Lessons and Exercises

If you want to get published, these three lessons will help:

  • The Secret to Writing On Your Blog Every Day
  • How to Publish Your Book and Sell Your First 1,000 Copies
  • How to Get Published in Literary Magazines

11 Writing Prompts

Need inspiration or just a kick in the pants to write. Try one of our top writing prompts :

  • Grandfathers [writing prompt]
  • Out of Place [writing prompt]
  • Sleepless [writing prompt]
  • Longing [writing prompt]
  • Write About Yourself [writing prompt]
  • 3 Reasons You Should Write Ghost Stories
  • Road Trip [writing prompt]
  • Morning [writing prompt]
  • The Beach [writing prompt]
  • Fall [writing prompt]
  • How to Use Six-Word Stories As Writing Prompts

Is It Time To Begin Your Writing Practice?

It's clear that if you want to become a writer, you need to practice writing. We've created a proven process to practice your writing at The Write Practice, but even if you don't join our community, I hope you'll start practicing in some way today.

Personally, I waited  far  too long to start practicing and it set my writing back years.

How about you? Do you think practicing writing is important?  Let me know in the comments section .

Choose one of the writing practice posts above. Then, read the lesson and participate in the writing exercise, posting your work in the Pro Practice Workshop . And if you post, please give feedback to your fellow writers who also posted their practices.

Have fun and happy practicing!

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Joe Bunting

Joe Bunting is an author and the leader of The Write Practice community. He is also the author of the new book Crowdsourcing Paris , a real life adventure story set in France. It was a #1 New Release on Amazon. Follow him on Instagram (@jhbunting).

Want best-seller coaching? Book Joe here.

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50 Comments

Kristen

You have THE BEST content for writing on this blog!!

Joe Bunting

Thank you, Kristen. This made my morning. 🙂

Mitch Hamilton

Thanks Mitch. 🙂

George McNeese

I can’t remember when I started following this website. I have to look in my notebooks because that’s where I did these practices. I didn’t have access to a computer when I did them, so I wrote them out, setting the time limit. But even when I do get to a computer, I have my reservations about putting my practices on the page. even though it’s practice, I want them to be the best, almost perfect. But I know it won’t be. I’ve gotten feedback before that says so. It still gets to me that I didn’t put something together that not everyone liked. I need to get over it. After all, that is what these practices are about: to learn and improve on our craft.

I don’t know either, George, but it’s been several years. Perfectionism is something so many of us face, and it’s made worse when you don’t have a critique community as warm and encouraging as ours is. I hope you and everyone here are always willing to try something new, even if it comes out a little messed up, because you know we’ll support you and try to make you better.

Elizabeth Varadan

What a great share! Thanks so much!

You’re so welcome, Elizabeth. Thank you for commenting.

Patience

when I ran writing classes I wrote. when I am “a member of writing classes” the teacher/leader/facilitator is NOT MY AUDIENCE and so I don’t write as well/as much. I don’t get the feedback I need from fellow students because most of them have never run their own writing projects/workshops. So many people expect you to write their story for them. I’ve actually got quite a few stories of me own. I have finally decided I like owning them. 😉

It sounds like you need a new critique group, Patience! Hope you can find a place where you get the feedback you need.

Stephanie Ward

Wow! Terrific round-up of resources. 🙂

Thanks Stephanie. 🙂

Carrie Lynn Lewis

Practice is necessary, period. It doesn’t matter what you want to learn. If you want to improve, practice is vital.

It’s odd. I’ve known and applied that principle for years on a variety of things. Painting. Drawing. Blogging. Gardening. Laundry.

But never writing.

Like you, I had the notion that just writing every day was all it took to improve. Why not the same level of dedication to writing?

Perhaps it’s time to change that!

I can relate, Carrie. It’s easy to confuse the craft of writing with journaling, thinking that you can just write whatever you feel like and you’ll get better, write something worth reading. The truth is that writing interesting things to read is a skill, but the good news is that you can get better at it with practice. Thanks for practicing with us! 🙂

Debra johnson

I love these suggestions , and have set Writing Practice as my homepage so the first 15 minutes of my day is spent writing, whether its a practice or exercise here or another that is sprinkled through out this site, Thank you for all you do everyone here at The Write Practice

marlita

This is great Debra. I want to write the first 15 minutes of my day too!

I agree with Joe, Do it. Could be your to do list… ( that could lead to something else story wse later)

I love that, Debra. Such a good way to start your day.

Thanks Joe!

Hyacinth Fidelis Joaquin

The best! Thank you so much for this.

You’re very welcome!

nobody geek

I simply LOVE all the tips and suggestions given on this blog. They are super helpful!

THANK you. We love sharing them with you. 🙂

Thiago d'Evecque

Hi! You forgot the link to How to Write a Story a Week: A Day-by-Day Guide.

Thanks a lot for your work! This post is amazing.

It’s a great post Thiago. Definitely one of our most shared. Thanks for mentioning it! BTW here’s the link:

https://thewritepractice.com/a-story-a-week/

Harsh Rathour

Wow!! There are so many exercises…. I just love it..! I am gonna really enjoy it..!

Awesome! Thank you for reading and practicing with us. 🙂

Macau Mum

I only read halfway , My tootie is jumping all over me, and typing this is a struggle when a 3yr old wants his Toy Story movie on Youtube in this computer. Thank you for this article, will come back later to finish reading.

I know the feeling! Good luck!

Beth

Can’t wait to get stuck in with this! 🙂

LaCresha Lawson

Very helpful! Thank you!

strictlynoelephant

I’ve just bookmarked this page. Thanks for this wonderful list.

fireandparchment

This is awesome! So many helpful tips. I will be coming back to this often. Thanks for posting this!

Jessica M

Wow, so many goodies! Thank you for always providing such amazing content!!

Jacqueline Nicole

I have enjoyed all these articles. Thank you for the help an inspiration to get my writing on its way. My creativity is boosting with confidence. Tootle loo.

Emmanuel Ajayi Adigun

Amazing contents for beginners like me Joe. I am highly inspired by your commitment. Thank you.

Hey, thanks!

Sondra

Although I have only read half of thisc article, the practice exercises are excellent. Some of them are exactly what a beginning writer like myself needs. I am committing to at least try ALL of them. Thanks Joe!!

Kbee E. Betancourt

very helpful! thank you..

Celia Costa

Amazing articles! Thanks so much for sharing!

The Black Hearth

My god this article made me love this site . You know it’s kinda hard for a beginner writer, who don’t know where to start and fixing goals, even samll ones give us a direction . A place to go , an aim for our creativity so thanks you , this community and this site. Love you all . At your pens ! 😉

carmelle

Wow. This is great. I find all your posts informative, but this one is the best for me to use as a guide to get my self starting to write….Thank you.

aurora1920

I’m an old lady who wants to publish one more book before I die — have published several, all non-fiction, and done two under contract to a major publisher (reference books). So help me, the BIGGEST problem I have all along, is keeping track of the damned paper work and research that goes into a book!!! Yet I never ever see articles on something as simple as “How to file” — Oh I know, there’s wonderful software these days so probably I will never find a way to get paper organized — everybody will use software and do it on the computer. I’m too old for that — just one look at the learning curve for software, even putting the damned stuff into computer files is even MORE frustrating than paper!! Oh well, somehow I managed in the past to get books published, I may be able to do it one more time.

Hamzah Ramadan

you enjoy writing more than anything else and you do indeed care to help others write. I love writing but translation from Arabic into English and English into Arabic is taking all of my time from the early hours of the morning till the evening. I will soon get all of your books in order to read them as soon as possible. One thing I am sure of. You know what you are doing very well. Hamzah

Dusan

Excellent! Many useful tips. Many thanks!

Mark Bono

Liz and Joe, I have only looked at a few exercises. Already, I am convinced that your site is one of the best sites out there. Thank your for sharing your wisdom.

aparna WWeerakoon

Wow, these are the best lessons and exercises for writing. Actually i’m participating in a compitition this wendsday. so, i’m quite nervous and exited. this helped me a lot

Mehedi

Magnificent post ever I have read. This article will help me a lot to write a right way. Thank you.

Alexiss Anthonyy Murillo

i need your help to improve to become a better writer please. i think i usually commit moist of these errors and i don;t pay attention to many advices too.

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Paragraph Writing MCQs Quiz With Answers

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Welcome to our Paragraph Writing Quiz, designed to help you sharpen your writing skills and master the art of crafting well-structured paragraphs! In this quiz, you'll encounter questions that challenge you to demonstrate your ability to construct clear and coherent paragraphs. You'll explore the components of a strong paragraph, including topic sentences, supporting details, and concluding sentences. Additionally, you'll have the opportunity to practice organizing ideas logically, using transitions effectively, and maintaining coherence throughout your writing. By engaging with this quiz, you'll not only test your knowledge of paragraph structure and organization but also enhance your writing skills through practical Read more application. Whether you're tackling narrative, descriptive, expository, or persuasive writing tasks, the principles you'll learn in this quiz are applicable across various genres and formats.

Paragraph Writing Questions and Answers

What is the first sentence of a paragraph called.

The introduction sentence

The exclusive sentence

The topic sentence

The first sentence

Rate this question:

How many sentences does a paragraph usually have?

When do you use supporting details or supporting sentences.

Before the first sentence in the introduction

After the last sentence because it helps you summarize the paragraph.

Never use these in paragraphs because they are for essays only.

After the topic sentence and before the closing sentence

Which of the following is the primary purpose of a topic sentence in a paragraph?

To provide supporting details

To summarize the entire essay

To introduce the main idea of the paragraph

To conclude the paragraph

What is a descriptive paragraph?

Unbiased description of a person, animal, place, or thing, along with idea and theme.

Tell a story to the reader.

Give your opinion to the reader.

Explaining a concept or idea.

The basic paragraph consists of how many parts?

A topic sentence is the central idea of each paragraph, usually appearing at the beginning of the paragraph., what is the main purpose of the persuasive paragraph.

Inspire the reader to feel a certain way towards an event, character, place, etc. 

Explain a concept in full depth.

Make the reader experience whatever is narrated.

Which element is essential to include at the beginning of a well-structured paragraph?

A detailed example

A concluding sentence

A topic sentence

A quotation

A paragraph can never end with an exclamation mark. True or false?

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‘You write the laws you f------ idiots’: Australia’s reaction to Lord’s stumping row revealed

Third series of The Test reveals how Marcus Harris, David Warner and Usman Khawaja responded to MCC members’ fury

Usman Khawaja and David Warner stop to remonstrate with supporters in the Long Room

The Australian cricket team’s immediate response to the infamous stumping of Jonny Bairstow at Lord’s last summer has been laid bare, with opener Marcus Harris telling a group of MCC members “you write the rules you f------ idiots”.

The story of the 2023 Ashes summer is told in the third series of the Test, the Prime Video documentary that follows the Australian side and is released on May 24. The series finished 2-2, with Australia giving up a 2-0 lead, and admitting they were “bullied” in the only drawn match, at Old Trafford , where rain denied England a strong shot at victory.

The series’ biggest flashpoint came shortly before lunch on the final day of the second Test at Lord’s, though, when Bairstow was controversially stumped by Alex Carey off a bouncer, having dozily wandered out of his ground believing Cameron Green’s over to be complete. It proved a key moment in a Test that Australia went on to win by 43 runs.

In the series, which features live footage from inside the away dressing room as well as interviews reflecting on the incident, the Australia captain Pat Cummins takes credit for the dismissal , saying he had spotted Bairstow walking out of his ground.

After Australia were booed off the field and through the Long Room in unprecedented scenes for Lord’s, their dressing room is a chaotic scene.

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“Walking back into the Long Room, that is how I will always remember the Lord’s Test match,” reflects Cummins. “It was like we had ripped the soul out of them.

“Absolutely people stepped over the line. I don’t think that’s how you should treat people.

“You do something and you expect a certain outcome. That was, I thought, relatively vanilla, and it just blew up.”

Usman Khawaja, the opening batsman, took umbrage with an MCC member’s comments.

“One of the MCC members started spraying me,” he says. “I said: ‘Nah, you can’t be saying that stuff’. He said ‘I can say whatever I f------ want’, that sense of entitlement. There were three of them I called out, one of them was really inappropriate.”

In the away changing room, Marnus Labuschagne alleges that a member tried to trip David Warner on the stairs, before recalling an incident in the lunchroom.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a group of grown, old men [behave like that],” he says. “One bloke was foaming at the mouth. A block kicked Bull [Warner] as he was going up the stairs.

“You missed a brawl in the lunchroom! Jonny came in hot and said: ‘Are you guys happy with that?’ Davey was like, ‘Yep’. Priceless.”

Harris, who was acting as 12th man, reveals that he laughed off a members’ complaints by reminding them that the Marylebone Cricket Club, the owners of Lord’s, were the guardians of the game’s laws.

“They were kicking off over the fence,” he says. “I was like: ‘You write the rules you f------ idiots! It’s not our fault.’”

Australia’s players were, to a man, remorseless about the incident, with the spinner Nathan Lyon saying: “It’s a load of crap. It’s a stumping. It’s out every day of the week.” And Cummins adds: “For me it was clear cut, that’s out.”

The series also shows the fury of Australia’s players over a ball change in the final Test at the Oval after which they lost their top three in quick succession and slid to defeat.

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Gemini Advanced vs ChatGPT Plus: Which is better?

  • Gemini Advanced costs $20 monthly with constantly updated training data, making it better at answering current event questions.
  • ChatGPT Plus is $20 too and creates better graphic designs but has limitations like poor text quality.
  • Gemini Advanced is faster at generating results and provides clearer, more concise written content than ChatGPT.

Listen long enough to the buzz about artificial intelligence, and the names ChatGPT and Gemini will stand out from the noise. The AI chatbots from OpenAI and Google are some of the biggest players in the space. However, asking both the same question may yield wildly different answers due to their use of different training datasets.

Both Google's Gemini Advanced and ChatGPT Plus subscriptions cost around $20 every month for access to the full list of features. (Notably, ChatGPT does not have a free trial, while Gemini offers two months free). However, the two chatbots use different training datasets, which can significantly influence the responses they generate. GPT-4's dataset was trained on approximately 570 GB of data, but this knowledge extends only through April 2023, requiring the integrated Bing browsing tool to find facts about recent events that occurred after that cutoff.

Google's Gemini Advanced does not use a static training database; it is constantly being updated, which means the chatbot is better at answering questions about current events.

However, that's not the only way the two platforms differ. I posed the same questions to ChatGPT Plus and Google Gemini Advanced, with topics and tasks ranging across art, politics, math, and ethics. The chatbots often churned out wildly different answers -- and those responses offer a clear indication of which platform to try.

I tried ChatGPT Plus. Here's everything it can do

Image test: chatgpt plus produces more art, gemini advanced has paused image generation of people.

First, I asked both platforms to create a watercolor image of a woman holding flowers . ChatGPT Plus delivered two different options with soft, flowing brushstrokes , which helped obliterate the details in the face and hands that image generators aren't great at yet.

Gemini Advanced declined to produce anything. Google temporarily removed the option to generate images of people in February 2024 after complaints that it made historical depictions of the Founding Fathers inaccurate by depicting multiple races. Racism is an issue among many artificial intelligence platforms. Google explains that Gemini Advanced was programmed to represent a wide range of people but admitted that diversity-focused programming created issues when requesting images of someone of a specific demographic.

Since Gemini Advanced couldn't create a person, I tried just asking for watercolor paintings of spring flowers. Both did a pretty good job, but Gemini Advanced produced three paintings faster than ChatGPT Plus created one option. Frustratingly, however, Gemini Advanced seemed to only produce square images, even when I specifically requested a different aspect ratio.

I next switched from paintings to graphic design and quickly realized that Gemini Advanced wouldn't actually design anything. Instead, Gemini made a list of suggestions for how to design it, wrote the content, and even suggested software and places to hire a freelance graphic designer.

ChatGPT Plus, on the other hand, will create graphic designs but often probably shouldn't. I asked it to create an infographic about what to wear and what not to wear to a family photo shoot. The graphics looked quite good, but much of the text was gibberish. The inability to create text in graphics is a known shortcoming for AI generators. I then asked it to remove the text entirely. While the resulting graphic was good, it included both the dos and don'ts in the graphic without differentiating which was which. I then asked it to create a postcard advertising my photography , but the results were straight out of a horror film. The faces were so wrong they looked like decaying corpses. One groom was holding the hands of two brides, one of whom had an arm coming straight out of her bosom.

ChatGPT Plus will produce more types of graphics . However, the types of images that Gemini Advanced refuses to produce are the same types that the other AI failed miserably at creating.

What is Gemini? Google's AI model and GPT-4 alternative explained

Writing test: gemini advanced gets right to the point, chatgpt plus tends to be more long-winded.

I asked both programs to write me a 500-word short story about a haunted house. Both followed the instructions well. However, neither came up with anything beyond the usual haunted house tropes, as AI is more a remix of ideas than a creator of something entirely new. ChatGPT Plus's story felt clichéd and was littered with passive voice, while Gemini Advanced did a better job showing the details rather than offering a bland retelling of the story.

Transitioning from creative to professional writing, I then asked both platforms to write a sample cover letter for a software engineer looking for a job. Both produced a rather bland template but included spots to insert specific details. Gemini's letter was shorter, more to the point, and followed up with tips for writing a cover letter. ChatGPT's output was longer and redundant -- I would have cut out at least a paragraph from what was generated. I then asked both programs to write a letter of resignation and a professional email, and the results were similar, with ChatGPT Plus being a bit longer (if the prompt isn't limited to a specific word count) and Gemini Advanced getting right to the point .

While both platforms can handle mundane tasks like writing emails, I preferred Gemini Advanced's results . The Google-owned AI was straight to the point for business writing, while the short story it generated also felt more refined, whereas ChatGPT's felt more like a first draft.

How to use Google's Gemini AI from the web or your phone

Advice test: gemini advanced answers with linked resources, but chatgpt plus is sometimes less frustrating.

I then asked both platforms a range of different questions. First, I asked for advice on avoiding bears during a hike . Both offered some of the same advice, but Gemini Advanced linked to sources where I could find out why exactly bear bells don't work. ChatGPT Plus sometimes has links at the end but did not for that specific question.

I then asked them to solve one of my fifth grader's math problems . (I hated learning fractions the first time around, and the second time isn't any more enjoyable.) Both platforms got the correct answer, but ChatGPT Plus said simplifying 10/3 to 3 1/3 was optional, while Gemini Advanced called it an improper fraction and explained that you should simplify it. Both initially wrote the answer as a decimal until I specifically asked for an answer written as a fraction.

Gemini's explanation of how to solve the math problem was only three steps long; ChatGPT's was six. Just like with the writing tasks, ChatGPT Plus was unnecessarily wordy, and I thought Gemini's shorter description was easier to follow.

I then asked questions about current events -- which actually took multiple tries to find a question that both platforms would attempt to answer. Gemini Advanced wouldn't answer questions about politics , while ChatGPT Plus didn't know that the prime minister of Haiti had resigned. This was somewhat expected as ChatGPT is trained on older data, but it did not even attempt to use the Bing search plugin to verify if the answer was current.

I finally found a question about current events that both platforms would answe r-- sort of. I asked about moon landings , looking specifically for the February 2024 landing that happened after ChatGPT's training data was updated. ChatGPT Plus answered immediately with a number followed by an explanation, including the latest Odysseus mission. Gemini erred on the side of caution and told me that there were six crewed and multiple uncrewed landings. I asked again, and Gemini said that the question was "a bit complex to answer definitively." I never did get a number -- though I did get several links -- but when I finally adjusted my question to "successful uncrewed soft landings," the most recent February 2024 landing was included, which is what I was looking for.

6 Google Gemini prompts to try for the best results

Speed test: gemini advanced is faster, chatgpt plus / gpt-4 is limited to 40 messages every 3 hours.

One of the main purposes of generative AI is to handle tasks that we don't want to deal with -- such as fifth-grade math -- or to accelerate more mundane processes. With the latter in mind, I submitted several prompts simultaneously to see which platform would generate a result first. Gemini Advanced consistently responded first , even creating three watercolor paintings before ChatGPT Plus had completed one. Gemini Advanced was also noticeably quicker at solving math questions.

The results are unsurprising once you delve into the data. GPT-4 is limited to 40 messages every three hours, whereas Gemini Advanced can handle up to 60 requests per minute.

One of the main purposes of generative AI is to handle tasks that we don't want to handle -- like 5th-grade math -- or to speed up the more mundane processes. With the latter in mind, I sent across many of the prompts at the same time, looking to see which platform generated a result first. Gemini Advanced answered first nearly every time, including creating three watercolor paintings before ChatGPT Plus had finished with one. Gemini Advanced was also noticeably faster at answering math questions.

10 ChatGPT extensions to try and what exactly they can do

Ethics test: chatgpt plus refuses to copy artists' style, and gemini advanced won't talk about politics.

Ethics should be a key consideration when comparing different AI platforms. If you refuse to use an AI that scrapes training data from the web without the owner's permission, then you're still out of luck here. Both are also capable of answering questions incorrectly, so factual data should always be double-checked when working with any AI chatbot. But what about ethics and how each chatbot answers key questions?

When prompted, Gemini Advanced created a landscape painting in the style of Picasso. ChatGPT Plus, on the other hand, responded that requesting a specific artist's style violated content policies. It then suggested creating a painting "inspired by early 20th-century art movements that emphasize geometric shapes, fragmented forms, and vibrant colors." The result was similar to Gemini Advanced's, but the prompt was not connected to the artist's name. That courtesy seems to be limited to visual arts. Neither one refused when I asked them to write in the style of Stephen King.

Overall, Gemini's approach is to disable options that aren't quite right. It won't respond to questions about politics and has disabled generative images of people until some diversity issues can be remedied. However, ChatGPT Plus won't produce results in a specific visual artist's style .

How to master GPT-4 in ChatGPT: Prompts, tips, and tricks

Privacy test: chatgpt lets you delete more data, gemini will keep data for up to three years.

Another consideration is how your data is used. Both platforms retain data for later training. Some Gemini prompts will be viewed by human staff, so users should not share personal data on the platform. Gemini Advanced can keep the data for up to three years, though it is not associated with your account that far out. In comparison, ChatGPT allows you to turn off chat history , which means you will not be able to go back to previous chats, but the company has less of your data. With this setting, ChatGPT deletes your conversations once every 30 days . Your data is still used for training, but not for the long term.

Google launches Gemini AI, its answer to GPT-4, and you can try it now

Extra features test: gemini advanced has more, but chatgpt plus does have a wealth of plugins.

As part of the Google family, Gemini Advanced can be found in more than just the web browser chat window. Gemini can assist you with writing or proofreading in Gmail, as well as in apps like Google Docs. integrated into Pixel devices , though iOS users can still access the AI inside the Google app. The $20-a-month subscription also includes 2TB of cloud storage with Google One .

ChatGPT Plus doesn't offer the same integrations, but with a longer history, it boasts a more extensive list of different custom GPTs for users to explore. In the Explore GPTs tab , you can discover anything from tutors to coding to coloring book pages. You can find custom GPTs from companies like Kayak, Canva, Khan Academy, and more. With ChatGPT web browser extensions , you can also access a range of tools that work directly inside a web browser. GPT-4 also supports the uploading of JPGs and PDFs, whereas Gemini Advanced is limited to image uploads. ChatGPT has both a web application and a dedicated app that, like Gemini, can also use voice.

Verdict: Which is AI chatbot subscription is best?

I prefer gemini, but chatgpt is needed for ai image generation.

Google's Gemini Advanced produced clearer, more concise written content. I preferred the written results of Gemini Advanced over ChatGPT. The Google-owned chatbot also had the fastest performance out of the two. The fact that it comes from a large tech company also gives it clear benefits like 2 TB of cloud storage included in the price and integration into Google Docs and other apps.

While I preferred the results from Gemini Advanced a majority of the time, ChatGPT Plus was capable of more tasks. It can, for example, produce graphic designs that Gemini refused. It's worth noting, however, that the types of images Gemini won't create are also the types of images that ChatGPT struggles to produce acceptable results with, including images of people and graphics that contain text. However, ChatGPT also allows users to delete their data every 30 days, while Google keeps it for up to three years. ChatGPT's longer history also means that it offers a lot of different custom plug-ins that are tailored for a specific task.

Overall, Google's Gemini Advanced is the subscription that I would pick if I wanted an AI to help type out emails or decipher math homework. ChatGPT Plus would be my choice for generating images using DALL-E, using specific plug-ins, or for greater control over what happens to your data.

Q: What is Gemini Advanced and ChatGPT Plus?

Gemini is Google's AI chatbot that's integrated with Google products, and Advanced is the AI's paid subscription tier. ChatGPT Plus, on the other hand, is a paid subscription to OpenAI's ChatGPT. Like Advanced, it's more powerful and has more features and capabilities.

Q: How much do Gemini Advanced and ChatGPT Plus cost each?

Here's the current pricing information:

  • Gemini Advanced: Included in the Google One AI Premium Plan at $19.99 per month. This plan also offers other Google AI benefits and increased Google One storage.
  • ChatGPT Plus: Costs $20 per month. This plan offers access to DALL-E image generation and the GPT store.

This article may contain affiliate links that Microsoft and/or the publisher may receive a commission from if you buy a product or service through those links.

Gemini Advanced vs ChatGPT Plus: Which is better?

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  • Published: 08 May 2024

Accurate structure prediction of biomolecular interactions with AlphaFold 3

  • Josh Abramson   ORCID: orcid.org/0009-0000-3496-6952 1   na1 ,
  • Jonas Adler   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-9928-3407 1   na1 ,
  • Jack Dunger 1   na1 ,
  • Richard Evans   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-4675-8469 1   na1 ,
  • Tim Green   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-3227-1505 1   na1 ,
  • Alexander Pritzel   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4233-9040 1   na1 ,
  • Olaf Ronneberger   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4266-1515 1   na1 ,
  • Lindsay Willmore   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-4314-0778 1   na1 ,
  • Andrew J. Ballard   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-4956-5304 1 ,
  • Joshua Bambrick   ORCID: orcid.org/0009-0003-3908-0722 2 ,
  • Sebastian W. Bodenstein 1 ,
  • David A. Evans 1 ,
  • Chia-Chun Hung   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5264-9165 2 ,
  • Michael O’Neill 1 ,
  • David Reiman   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-1605-7197 1 ,
  • Kathryn Tunyasuvunakool   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-8594-1074 1 ,
  • Zachary Wu   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-2429-9812 1 ,
  • Akvilė Žemgulytė 1 ,
  • Eirini Arvaniti 3 ,
  • Charles Beattie   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-1840-054X 3 ,
  • Ottavia Bertolli   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-8578-3216 3 ,
  • Alex Bridgland 3 ,
  • Alexey Cherepanov   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5227-0622 4 ,
  • Miles Congreve 4 ,
  • Alexander I. Cowen-Rivers 3 ,
  • Andrew Cowie   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4491-1434 3 ,
  • Michael Figurnov   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-1386-8741 3 ,
  • Fabian B. Fuchs 3 ,
  • Hannah Gladman 3 ,
  • Rishub Jain 3 ,
  • Yousuf A. Khan   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-0201-2796 3 ,
  • Caroline M. R. Low 4 ,
  • Kuba Perlin 3 ,
  • Anna Potapenko 3 ,
  • Pascal Savy 4 ,
  • Sukhdeep Singh 3 ,
  • Adrian Stecula   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6914-6743 4 ,
  • Ashok Thillaisundaram 3 ,
  • Catherine Tong   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7570-4801 4 ,
  • Sergei Yakneen   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7827-9839 4 ,
  • Ellen D. Zhong   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6345-1907 3 ,
  • Michal Zielinski 3 ,
  • Augustin Žídek   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-0748-9684 3 ,
  • Victor Bapst 1   na2 ,
  • Pushmeet Kohli   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-7466-7997 1   na2 ,
  • Max Jaderberg   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-9033-2695 2   na2 ,
  • Demis Hassabis   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-2812-9917 1 , 2   na2 &
  • John M. Jumper   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6169-6580 1   na2  

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  • Drug discovery
  • Machine learning
  • Protein structure predictions
  • Structural biology

The introduction of AlphaFold 2 1 has spurred a revolution in modelling the structure of proteins and their interactions, enabling a huge range of applications in protein modelling and design 2–6 . In this paper, we describe our AlphaFold 3 model with a substantially updated diffusion-based architecture, which is capable of joint structure prediction of complexes including proteins, nucleic acids, small molecules, ions, and modified residues. The new AlphaFold model demonstrates significantly improved accuracy over many previous specialised tools: far greater accuracy on protein-ligand interactions than state of the art docking tools, much higher accuracy on protein-nucleic acid interactions than nucleic-acid-specific predictors, and significantly higher antibody-antigen prediction accuracy than AlphaFold-Multimer v2.3 7,8 . Together these results show that high accuracy modelling across biomolecular space is possible within a single unified deep learning framework.

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These authors contributed equally: Josh Abramson, Jonas Adler, Jack Dunger, Richard Evans, Tim Green, Alexander Pritzel, Olaf Ronneberger, Lindsay Willmore

These authors jointly supervised this work: Victor Bapst, Pushmeet Kohli, Max Jaderberg, Demis Hassabis, John M. Jumper

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Core Contributor, Google DeepMind, London, UK

Josh Abramson, Jonas Adler, Jack Dunger, Richard Evans, Tim Green, Alexander Pritzel, Olaf Ronneberger, Lindsay Willmore, Andrew J. Ballard, Sebastian W. Bodenstein, David A. Evans, Michael O’Neill, David Reiman, Kathryn Tunyasuvunakool, Zachary Wu, Akvilė Žemgulytė, Victor Bapst, Pushmeet Kohli, Demis Hassabis & John M. Jumper

Core Contributor, Isomorphic Labs, London, UK

Joshua Bambrick, Chia-Chun Hung, Max Jaderberg & Demis Hassabis

Google DeepMind, London, UK

Eirini Arvaniti, Charles Beattie, Ottavia Bertolli, Alex Bridgland, Alexander I. Cowen-Rivers, Andrew Cowie, Michael Figurnov, Fabian B. Fuchs, Hannah Gladman, Rishub Jain, Yousuf A. Khan, Kuba Perlin, Anna Potapenko, Sukhdeep Singh, Ashok Thillaisundaram, Ellen D. Zhong, Michal Zielinski & Augustin Žídek

Isomorphic Labs, London, UK

Alexey Cherepanov, Miles Congreve, Caroline M. R. Low, Pascal Savy, Adrian Stecula, Catherine Tong & Sergei Yakneen

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Correspondence to Max Jaderberg , Demis Hassabis or John M. Jumper .

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This Supplementary Information file contains the following 9 sections: (1) Notation; (2) Data pipeline; (3) Model architecture; (4) Auxiliary heads; (5) Training and inference; (6) Evaluation; (7) Differences to AlphaFold2 and AlphaFold-Multimer; (8) Supplemental Results; and (9) Appendix: CCD Code and PDB ID tables.

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Abramson, J., Adler, J., Dunger, J. et al. Accurate structure prediction of biomolecular interactions with AlphaFold 3. Nature (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07487-w

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