I hold an interesting, if somewhat dubious distinction: at 59%, I have the lowest "sketch accuracy" of anyone on the leaderboard (that is, the top 25) (although PM325 and Janine Johnson come close to matching me, with accuracies of 60% and 61%, respectively). In part, that reflects my skill at wielding a touchpad, and my artistic talent in general, but there's more to it than that.

One of the things that drags down my accuracy is that I try to be a purist about the hints I give. I use the hint button, once, which usually means the first letter. (I wouldn't be surprised if this is why Janine and PM have relative low accuracies too: they also tend to be conservative with their hints, from what I've seen).

The practice that's grown up here is slightly more liberal than this: there are accepted ways of hinting at a word that go beyond what I like to do. I'm not trying to impose my views on anyone else here, but I wonder what people think about this subject in general. Most people agree that, as far as letters or numbers go, only the first letter of the first word is acceptable, but beyond that, are there any informal restrictions on how you hint at your words?

For my part, I think of the fundamental challenge of Pictionary as being to illustrate the word or phrase itself. Below are the various "non-illustrative" methods of hinting I've seen, and how they break down for me, ordered roughly by how much they bother me, from least to most (let me stress again that I am giving a personal opinion, not making some futile attempt to "lay down the law" as I see it):

1) First letter/number of letters/words/Type of word.

These certainly have nothing to do with illustrating the word directly, but hints have their place. For instance, even if a picture successfully conveys that a man is smiling with joy, it can be hard to distinguish between words like "happy", "cheerful", "joyful", "smiling", etc. In a case like that, giving the first letter as a hint is an adjunct to the picture, not a substitute for it. On the other hand, a hint like K-----/--/-------/----- which is immediately interpreted as "Knight in shining armor" before a sketch is begun (I saw that in one game) does not really feel like Pictionary at all. In my opinion, hints should ideally fall in the first category rather than the second. In other words, if the word might reasonably be guessed from the "hint" alone without a picture, it's starting to be more than a hint.

For my part, I try to stick to the original hint button, which means a) I wait for the button to come up before hinting and b) I give only one of the three hints (usually first letter). I do often draw the hint on the board too, since otherwise, people sometimes miss it.

I don't personally give the first letter AND the number of words/letters, and I also don't give the number of letters in each word of a multi-word phrase, but I've been tempted to do that, and I don't really condemn people who do.

2) Hinting at the component parts of a phrase instead of the phrase itself: for instance, drawing a dog and a house (and for many, a + sign in between them) for the word "doghouse". In general, I feel that this subverts the game a little: the fundamental challenge is to draw the item specified, not to find a way to convey what it is without actually depicting it.

That said, I have sometimes done this myself, usually in cases where the phrase as a separate whole is unfamiliar to me, or might be unfamiliar to others ("ninja-pirate" comes to mind).

3) Subverting the error-correction mechanism of XSketch to illustrate something entirely different from the given word, which will still be recognized as correct. For example, I've seen "dog + key" for "donkey" and "wine nut" for "pine nut".

I can't say I'm guiltless of this myself--I once drew a nest for "nes". I do draw something of a distinction between hinting at a different word ("nest") and hinting at a totally contrived phrase ("dog key"); the latter feels much more like a cheat, but perhaps that's just me rationalizing.

4) Hinting at letters in a word/phrase that have nothing to do with the word itself--e.g. drawing a ring for the last four letters of "boring" or a purse for "pursue". At least when you break a phrase down into parts, you are still hinting at pieces of its meaning--hinting at letter clusters is barely a step above drawing symbols for individual letters. I really don't like this practice.

5) A listening ear for "sounds like" ______. I never do this. Again, to me, this is a way of avoiding the essential challenge of Pictionary, which is to *draw* a phrase, not just to convey it.

6) Non-illustrative ways of revealing letters:
6a) Drawing connecting lines to indicate that two letters are the same. I don't know who first decided that this was OK, but for my money, it's fundamentally little better than drawing letters: an entirely non-pictorial way of revealing information about the spelling of a word.

Besides, you can argue that this does not actually reveal letters, but practically speaking, it often narrows down the range of possibilities considerably; for instance, not every letter can be doubled. When the letter being linked to is the first letter, which is also revealed, then for all intents and purposes, this *is* the same as writing another letter of the word. I had to sketch "aardvark" once (I lost that one); if I had "hinted" the double A, it would have been absurdly easy.

Probably the most egregious example of this sort of "hint" that I saw was a word clued as follows: 4 letters; first letter D; last letter same as first; second and third letters identical. I'll let you figure out what the word was. (No sketch was required.)

6b) Checking off letters as people guess them.

I don't really mind checking off words that are components of phrases, but checking off individual letters that happen to coincide with an otherwise unrelated guess ("MEn in Black" for "MElba toast") is abusing the system, imo. It's essentially just a sly way of "writing letters" without actually writing them.

If you think I'm making a big deal out of nothing with that one, consider that if you allow that, it's only one more step in theory to ignoring the sketch entirely and simply guessing for information. (I wonder if it would be a good idea to make the sketcher unable to see people's guesses.)

Anyway, those are some of my thoughts on the subject. I know that was a bit of a long post (and I didn't even mention everything I was going to); I hope that if you read it all, you enjoyed reading it, or if you didn't enjoy reading it, you didn't read it.

Please do leave comments if you have anything to say on the subject. I'm interested in your thoughts!