The Campus Cruciverbalist
The Campus Cruciverbalist
by Trista Lutgring
DAVID RITTERSKAMP, Instructor in Mathematics, remembers his mother and grandmother spending time doing crosswords and other puzzles when he was younger. "As early as 9 or 10 years old, I remember a magazine called Games that featured different crosswords, logic puzzles and other items like that," he said. "We had a subscription, so, every month there would be a new magazine with new crossword puzzles available to me."
This exposure to puzzles provided a hobby that led to creating them himself. He purchased software online that enabled him to set up a grid, pulling from a huge internal dictionary of words to help create workable puzzles. He joined an online community of people who solve, create and post their own creations. "I could see when people solved my puzzles, what worked and what didn't, how I could improve them," he says. "It's just been an ongoing process. I keep trying different things, working on getting better."
Many crossword puzzles tend to have themes: wordplay or longer answers connected in some way. Ritterskamp starts by picking how he would like things to be connected. "I'm always on the lookout for clever wordplay or popular phrases that can be put together in a theme," he says.
Once the grid is set, the next part is his favorite: writing the clues for the answers. "I like the challenge of coming up with a clue for a word that is not completely obvious but makes sense and is not too hard," he says. "I aim to be a little bit outside of the box but not so far out that it doesn't make sense to anyone else."
Ritterskamp's crossword puzzles have grown in elegance and sophistication since his early works, and last year, one was picked up by the Los Angeles Times. We invite you to solve this USI technology themed puzzle Ritterskamp created especially for Illume.