Three Things You Can Do To Improve Your Case-Writing

As with many debate skills, there is more than one correct way to write cases. Figuring out which approach works for you is generally a matter of trial and error. That said, it is possible to become too used to a sub-optimal writing process. Below are some tips to help you improve both the quality and efficiency of your case-writing process.

Case-writing is about moving from abstract to concrete. Can you actually put into play what seemed like a good idea on the drawing board? The worst case scenario is to invest lots of time and energy into the “brainstorming” phase of the process and at the end of the day be unable to put proverbial pen to paper. Many promising starts end up as half-finished outlines in the “Island of Misfit Cases” folder on your computer. I hope that adopting some of the following suggestions will prevent you from falling into this kind of quagmire.

1. Think positionally.

The first step in the casing process is to come up with an overarching “big picture” position on the topic. For the Jan/Feb topic, I might decide that I want to write a case about subjective self-defense or critiquing Battered Women’s Syndrome. A common mistake is getting locked into case details before solidifying the big picture. When I’m developing a case position, I’m not thinking “What is my standard going to be?” or “What is my contention level offense?” The casing process needs to be more dynamic so that your case structure can organically reflect your overarching position more clearly. In other words, it is difficult to construct a compelling position piecemeal. For your argument to cohere, the case should be structured around the argument you want to make, rather than trying to jury rig the argument to fit the case structure you’ve decided on.

Having a unified, coherent position allows you to do much better strategic planning. Thinking about how positions interact allows you to think more clearly about how individual arguments function rather than trying to confront opposing positions with a series of disconnected, one-off objections that ultimately complicate a ballot story rather than simplifying it. It also allows you to access the literature base on a given case position more easily.

2. Let the evidence drive the position.

Another common error I see in the casing process is to commit to a case position before you know whether the evidence exists to support it. This will manifest itself in constructives with lots of tag lines and “Insert Card Here” in parentheses all over the case. Instead you should start the casing process by getting a good sense of the literature. This will not only improve the quality of your arguments but also improve your efficiency. There are few things that waste time more than investing in a case position only to find at the end of the day that there just isn’t the evidence to support it. Instead of racking your brain to solidify an abstract idea in your head, delve into the research to see what the literature gives you. Without this step debaters often end up winging it on critical links that can derail the whole case position or require a total restructuring.

You may feel like you are wasting time cutting cards that won’t necessarily go into the case, but your underlying knowledge of the case position will serve you well when trying to deploy it in rounds. Moreover, you will understand the other side of the position so that you can more effectively answer it, and often you will use any evidence that doesn’t go into the actual constructive as frontline or extension evidence. If you are going to commit to this case position, you will never be sorry that you have a big file on the subject.

3. You are not done when you write the constructive.

When most debaters set out to write a case, they think that means only writing the constructive speech. In fact, that is only the first step. The skill which will set you apart is the ability to deploy that case position in rounds. That requires planning. Frontlines, blocks, and extension evidence better explaining particular aspects of the position are all important to include in your case file. During this process, you should again be thinking about how your arguments will interact with opposing positions. What arguments can you extend to control the internal links to major impacts? What arguments can you make to weigh your impacts against common disadvantages?

During this process, you will likely want to go back and revise aspects of the constructive speech. For example, if your AC on the Jan/Feb topic does not allow you to make a compelling argument to control the link into patriarchy impacts, you may want to tweak it to facilitate making that argument. At the end of the day, your goal is to walk into the round not only with four to six pages you can read in the constructive, but a position that gives you the tools to strategically engage any opposing position you’re likely to encounter.

Back to Basics: Case Writing—Part 1 by Lawrence Zhou

Lawrence Zhou is currently a Fulbright Taiwan Debate Coach and Trainer and an assistant coach at Apple Valley High School. He was formerly the Director of Lincoln-Douglas Debate at the Victory Briefs Institute and the 2014 NSDA National Champion in Lincoln-Douglas Debate. 

In this article, Lawrence talks about his favorite phrase when discussing case writing—think backwards; think forwards—and how this advice can fundamentally change the way that debaters write their cases.

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Continuing with my previous post in my new Back to Basics series, I want to return now to an important skill—case writing. As the September/October topic was recently released (shameless plug for the Victory Briefs packet available now), students are now in the process of writing or revising their cases for and against single-payer. (While I obviously aim most of my writing at LD, this one contains advice that PF debaters might also find useful!) 

However, casing (the process of writing cases) is not as easy as slapping some evidence together—it requires more thought and planning than initially meets the eye. I find that many JV or newer varsity debaters still find it challenging to craft a strong case on both sides. 

This article is not intended to serve as a comprehensive guide to casing.¹ Instead, this essay is the first part in a series of essays that illustrate core principles to follow when you are putting together your case. 

This first entry into this miniseries will focus on the phrase: Think backwards; think forwards. The rest of this essay will expound upon what this means and how to apply it to your case writing. 

Before we get into the specifics, I want to present this excellent quote from Anthony Trufanov in Part 3 of his (excellent) series Elevating the AFF (which I shouted out in the previous entry in this series): “While the 1AC is one of the first things I think about, it is also one of the last things I finish.” Why might this be the case? Read on to find out! 

Think Backwards; Think Forwards

Amazon is a company that (rightfully) receives lots of criticism (from abusing workers to destroying the environment to destroying competition in the market to so much else), but one thing that can’t be denied is how successful they’ve been at dominating the entire economy. How did they get to be so dominant? Part of it is certainly engaging in unethical business practices, but part of it is explained in Colin Bryar and Bill Carr’s new book Working Backwards: Insights, Stories and Secrets from Inside Amazon. As the name implies, one of the key lessons that Amazon followed was to work backwards—they would start with what they envisioned the finished product would look like before moving onto anything else. As Jonathan Knee writes, “The idea is to start with the desired customer experience when designing new products, going so far as to draft ‘a press release that literally announces the product as if it were ready to launch and an FAQ anticipating the tough questions.’” 

Why would Amazon follow this strategy of working backwards? How did that advantage them relative to their competitors? Because Amazon knew what they wanted and ruthlessly carried out whatever plan that got them where they wanted to be. No more wasted time fiddling around on projects that would be nothing more than distractions or diverted resources. No more second-guessing about whether they could accomplish what they set out to do. They had a vision and did whatever it took to achieve it (for better or worse). 

Again, Amazon is not a company that I would frequently champion, but at least the underlying part of the strategy—to work backwards—is undeniably effective and something we can learn something from. 

I think this is the single most common piece of advice that I give to students trying to write cases. In fact, you can hear me talk about it as far back as 2017, when I talk about this exact idea in my Debating Traditionally series (and, as always, I would strongly suggest watching that series as it summarizes the vast majority of my core thoughts on traditional and lay debate in one easy series). 

So, what does this phrase—think backwards; think forwards—mean? While I have yet to settle on any precise definition, the core idea can be summarized as follows: 

• Thinking backwards: What does the winning final rebuttal speech sound like? 
• Thinking forwards: What does it take to get there? 

In other words, I tend to think backwards from the final rebuttal speech and I tend to think forwards to the first rebuttal speech. I have found that this heuristic is among the better ways that I’ve discovered for beginning to introduce the idea of strategic thinking for most debaters. 

Let’s start with considering this advice from the affirmative side and what this advice would look like practically before looking at it from the perspective of the negative. 

Thinking Backwards

First, what is the most important affirmative speech? It clearly can’t be the affirmative constructive speech. No one wins for reading a good case—you can only win if you successfully prove the resolution is true throughout the debate. The fact that novices can read the same cases as varsity debaters and consistently lose (and that varsity debaters can read cases written by novices and consistently win) should make this abundantly clear. 

Yet, despite the fact that the affirmative constructive speech is obviously not the most important speech in the debate, so many debaters invest disproportionate time into casing and not nearly enough time into other important skills and content areas needed to win tougher debates. In other words, what is the value of writing a good case if you can’t successfully extend or defend it in the subsequent rebuttal speeches? True, a good case is what sets up subsequent speeches for success, but that hardly demonstrates anything beyond the fact that the affirmative constructive speech can rarely win or lose the debate on its own. 

Ok, if the most important affirmative speech isn’t the affirmative constructive speech, then surely it’s the dreaded first affirmative rebuttal or 1AR. This, I think, is a far more reasonable answer and I could see a case for it being the most important. It is, after all, an incredibly difficult speech (and is a speech that should definitely be lengthened to five minutes instead of the paltry four nowadays) to give and many debates are lost after the 1AR—if the 1AR improperly answers an entire negative contention or drops a takeout to the whole affirmative case, it’s pretty difficult to recover from that tactical blunder. If the 1AR is the speech that most often is the most proximate cause for lost affirmative rounds (and, in Part 3 of my Debating Traditionally series, I make the case for why I think the affirmative should lose the vast majority of rounds against otherwise equally matched opponents solely due to the difficulty of the 1AR), then I think it could reasonably be considered the most important affirmative speech. 

However, even the 1AR—scary as it might be—isn’t the most important speech, at least not in my view. Why not? While this blog post from Debate Drills explains does describe the 1AR as the most important speech (a view I obviously lightly disagree with), I think it does a good job of summarizing what I would take to be a set of strong reasons: 

First, it should always think from the 2AR backwards. The debate is never won in the 1AR; what matters is delivering a killer 2AR. The 1AR, although the most important speech (by nature of how hard it is), does not win the debate – it just sets up the 2AR. As a result, every argument in the 1AR should be purposive – don’t just make arguments to make them. An argument needs to contribute to a winning 2AR (whether by being an argument you’ll directly go for in the 2AR or by being an argument that you won’t extend but that wastes the opponent’s time) (emphasis mine).

This strikes me as one of the more succinct summaries of what the purpose of the 1AR is—it is just about setting up a winning 2AR. 

So, which speech, in my view, is ultimately the most important? The second affirmative rebuttal or 2AR! It’s the only speech that can win the debate—every other speech can really only lose you debates. You don’t win for reading a cool case; you don’t win for giving a solid 1AR. You win if you persuade the judge that the resolution is more likely true than false in the 2AR. 

Of course, that is easier done if the other speeches are good (hence why we’ll discuss them shortly), but I think it’s important to recognize that the value of the other two speeches lies primarily in how well they set up a winning 2AR. It doesn’t matter how good the pass was if you miss the dunk; it doesn’t matter how good the throw was if you trip before the touchdown (insert other strained sports analogy here).  

What I generally recommend debaters do is think about the “truest” feeling argument on the topic. By this, I don’t necessarily mean picking the argument that necessarily has the most academic support or the most plausible syllogism (since those are sometimes too convoluted to effectively sell to a lay audience). 

What I mean is that you should find the argument that resonates well with audiences because they feel that it’s a true argument. It’s the argument that someone hears and goes, “Yeah, that just makes sense,” or, “Oh, yeah, that’s obviously true.” That’s the type of argument we’re generally after—the one that feels true at a gut level. Obviously, there are limitations on this approach—don’t pick arguments that the negative is very likely to turn or that are blatantly false upon after just a brief examination. But instead pick the argument that you think stands the best chance of winning a debate in front of a wide variety of judges. 

Here are some of the questions I might ask a student as they were picking their “winning” 2AR argument: 

• Is the argument intuitive enough that most judges won’t immediately reject it out of hand? If not, I would consider a different argument. 
• Does the argument have adequate support in the scholarly literature? If not, it is likely because the chosen argument isn’t taken seriously by experts due to some obvious flaw with it. 
• Is the argument easily explainable in the context of time-crunched debate speech? If not, then the argument may not be worth making because you won’t have time to do anything other than extend your argument. 
• Is the argument easily refuted, e.g., are there obvious logical fallacies or strong negative responses? If yes, consider picking something more resistant to attack. (One caveat: Obviously, most stock affirmative arguments will be heavily criticized in the relevant literature—don’t let that deter you. The operative word is strong negative responses—not all negative responses are created equal. Just because an argument is criticized doesn’t mean it’s not a good one or that the criticisms are any good.)
• Is it strong enough to outweigh common negative arguments? If not, then winning the argument won’t matter as the negative’s offense will outweigh yours. 

Once you have selected an argument that roughly fits the criteria laid out above, I would think about how that integrates into the overall ballot story that you want to sell. As cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham notes in his book Why Don’t Students Like School: “The human mind seems exquisitely tuned to understand and remember stories--so much so that psychologists sometimes refer to stories as "psychologically privileged," meaning that they are treated differently in memory than other types of material.” 

This should be no groundbreaking insight—we remember stories far better than isolated facts. Consequently, there should be an emphasis on telling a good ballot story when thinking backwards. The question I would ask myself when writing a case is, “Why is the ultimate story you want to tell at the end of the debate?” 

One of the best pieces of advice I ever received on this front came from my high school debate coach who would often advise me that: 

The last 30 seconds of your final rebuttal should be verbatim what the judge writes for their RFD. 

This has been among the most important lessons that has stuck with me since high school and one of the best pieces of coaching advice that I can impart. While it is obviously never going to be the case that the RFD is a transcript of your final rebuttal, I think this serves as a shining North Star—a desirable goal to work towards. 

A ballot story, here defined as what you intend to be the written reason for decision for why the judge voted for you, is so important and powerful for three reasons: 

First, as Willingham notes, “stories are easy to comprehend, because the audience knows the structure, which helps to interpret the action. For example, the audience knows that events don't happen randomly in stories. There must be a causal connection, so if the cause is not immediately apparent, the audience will think carefully about the previous action to try to connect it to present events.” In the context of writing a good ballot story, a good ballot story will help the judge understand the connection between the various arguments in the debate. This helps judges understand which arguments matter more and how you still win even in the face of counterarguments. 

Second, Willingham writes, “stories are interesting. Reading researchers have conducted experiments in which people read lots of different types of material and rate each for how interesting it is. Stories are consistently rated as more interesting than other formats (for example, expository prose), even if the same information is presented.” This works especially well if your speeches are laden with ethos, pathos, and logos, where the arguments are made more interesting by weaving them together into a ballot story that is more engaging than just hearing facts alone. 

Third, Willingham concludes, “stories are easy to remember. There are at least two contributing factors here. Because comprehending stories requires lots of medium-difficulty inferences, you must think about the story's meaning throughout.” Ballot stories help resolve so much of the messiness of rounds by providing something that the judge can easily remember. 

In my opinion, only when a good ballot story has been established should the case writing begin. 

Let’s use the current Lincoln-Douglas topic—Resolved: The United States ought to implement a single-payer universal healthcare system—as an example. 

Imagine you are affirmative on this topic, defending the value of single-payer. After having done copious amounts of research such that you are familiar with the core arguments on the topic, you realize that the affirmative is largely confined to a limited set of arguments, e.g., concerns about unequal access to healthcare, arguments about reining in the high costs of healthcare in the United States, and advantages about pandemic prevention. 

The first question I would ask myself before I put pen to paper (or finger to keyboard) would be: “What do I want the first and last 30 seconds of my 2AR to sound like?” If I was strongly persuaded by the arguments about the potential of single-payer healthcare to save over 68,000 lives each year, I would want to design my case so that it set up a 2AR that could write a ballot story for why single-payer was the best way to save tens of thousands of lives each year. Only when I was satisfied with that ballot story would I begin writing my case. 

To conclude this segment, Jake Nebel summarizes this view in his essay “Positional Debating” (available here): 

Before writing your outline, ask yourself what you want your final rebuttal to sound like. Ask yourself what you don’t want your opponent’s final rebuttal to sound like. Now write the position with an eye to these final rebuttals. If you do this right, then you should have similar voting issues in every debate. This will make your final rebuttals significantly better because you’ll be practicing the same stories every round (emphasis mine). 

Personally, I found the entire essay on positional debating to be one of the more important ones that I have read in debate. It changed my entire outlook on how to approach casing and I think you’ll find it valuable as well. 

Thinking Forwards

So far, we’ve talked about what the end goal is. We’ve basically decided on the destination for our roadtrip. However, we still need to ask how we’re going to get there. This leads us nicely to the idea of thinking forwards—asking how we get to that winning 2AR that we’ve envisioned. 

In a debate, the negative is going to do their best to prevent you from reaching your final destination. They will raise objections to your arguments and present their own case for why your proposal or advocacy is bad. You need to plan out how you’re going to deal with the inevitable roadblocks the negative will try and raise. This requires thinking forwards. 

On most topics, there really aren’t that many arguments on both sides. This makes it fairly easy for debaters to anticipate the likely arguments and objections that the other side will make. For example, on this single-payer topic, there is one common negative argument you can expect to encounter in the vast majority of your rounds—wait times. Try as you might to escape it, the negative is probably going to read the wait times argument in nearly every single round. And smart negative debaters will likely not read the argument as a standalone negative contention but as a turn to the affirmative case. 

If this is likely to be an incredibly common response that directly interacts with arguments in your affirmative case, you should anticipate such a response and build-in warrants to answer this argument. 

My general rule of thumb is as follows: 

The affirmative should not need to make a single new argument in the 1AR against the three most common negative arguments against each contention. 

This means that if the negative makes the most common responses to your case, you have already anticipated this and have built-in something into your case designed to directly take out that common response. 

Returning to the wait times example, I suspect I will see many debates where the 1AR will read one, two, or even three pieces of evidence to answer the wait times argument. This is a mistake. The 1AR is a time-crunched speech that needs to maximize the value of every single second. The wait times argument is something that should be priced in (a fancy way of saying “anticipated”) because it’s something that directly interacts with many of the common affirmative arguments. 

That means at least one or two pieces of evidence in the affirmative case should have something to say about wait times, e.g., how single-payer still saves lives even assuming wait times; how wait times in the US are already high, especially for those without insurance now; or about how carefully designed and well-funded single-payer systems can avoid wait times. Given how weak the wait times argument is (at least to me), it is an argument that should be easily dispatched without having to make a single new argument in the 1AR—the 1AR merely needs to extend what was already written in the affirmative case to defeat this objection. 

Note that this does not mean that the affirmative case should be shoved full of preempts to every potential negative case. The affirmative should not, for example, read a contention called “preempts” and read one piece of evidence to answer the innovation argument, another piece of evidence to answer economic objections against single-payer, and another piece of evidence to answer a potential “public option” counterplan. This would be foolish. The negative may not read those contentions, so you would be directly preempting nothing. 

What this does mean is that when you are designing your case, you should aim to find arguments and evidence that are multi-functional. By this, I mean that you should aim to find arguments that and evidence that do more than one thing—maybe one piece of evidence is both a strong warrant for how single-payer saves lives and also a direct preempt to the wait times argument. Your case should still primarily aim to present a cogent story in favor of single-payer, not merely try and preempt everything the negative might potentially say. 

The Negative

A lot of the same advice mentioned above also applies to the negative. The negative case should be designed with a winning second negative rebuttal in mind (from here on out, I will refer to the second negative speech—the six minute one—as the second negative rebuttal or 2NR, although I think that reasonable substitutes would be negative rebuttal, NR, or 2N). 

The only major difference is that the negative only has two speeches compared to the affirmative’s three speeches. So, what is the negative thinking forwards to? 

One common error I see in many debaters is that they will excessively cross-apply arguments from the negative case as responses to the affirmative case. 

For example, one extremely common negative argument on the current LD topic is that single-payer would lead to increased rationing of medical services via longer wait times. While this is a solid negative argument (and should be made as a response to most affirmative cases), it would be a mistake to overly rely on this single argument to win (as most of the affirmative responses to this argument are quite compelling). 

Yet, so many negative debaters will read a negative case with a contention about wait times (not a mistake in and of itself) and not have a single response to the affirmative case that isn’t predicated on wait times. It was extremely common for debaters at camp to get to an affirmative contention and the only thing they would say was, “On my opponent’s first contention about access, cross-apply my negative contention about wait times—an increase in the number of insured people means nothing if people have access to equally long wait times that ensure no one, including the least well off, actually receives timely, quality care.” 

While the sentiment of the argument is nice (in more advanced terms, we might call this a turns case argument, where the truth of some offensive argument actually worsens some issue identified by the opponent) because more debaters should do turns case analysis, this is woefully insufficient to constitute a winning negative strategy. 

Why? The one advantage that the negative is guaranteed is an extreme time imbalance. The vast majority of topics slant in favor of the affirmative (and some aren’t slanted but steep cliffs like the public health emergencies topic from the 2021 NSDA National Tournament). The negative generally cannot hope to win via substantive advantage alone (although there are some topics that lean negative). Rather, the negative wins by applying copious amounts of pressure to the affirmative from a variety of angles in the hopes that the affirmative collapses underneath the onslaught of arguments. 

The very idea of “cross-applying” arguments as the negative is antithetical to this goal. It functionally forfeits speech time. It is the equivalent of unilaterally disarming yourself of the best tool available to the negative—time. 

Think about it. The 1AR is a difficult speech because it has to respond to seven minutes of diverse offense in just four minutes. Even assuming a 150% efficiency rate (being able to make six minutes worth of arguments in just four minutes), that still means that the affirmative should be dropping a whole minute of arguments after the 1AR. And given that most 1ARs are not 150% efficient, the 1AR should be dropping far more than a minute worth of arguments on average. 

But when the negative chooses to cross-apply an argument, they basically don’t make an argument at all. Does the affirmative suddenly need to respond to an argument twice just because it was cross-applied and thus appears in two places on the flow? No! If the affirmative defeats the argument, then there is simply nothing left. 

Similarly, if the negative reads a three minute negative case with two contentions—one about wait times and the other about medical innovation—but the only answer to the affirmative case is just cross-applying the wait times contention, then the negative has functionally only given a three speech speech. There goes the one thing that the negative had going for them—the time advantage. Now, the 1AR isn’t answering seven minutes of arguments in four minutes; it’s answering three minutes of arguments in four minutes, a far more manageable task. 

In debate jargon, we’re looking for a negative case that is external to common responses that could be levied against the affirmative case. Here, external means something that is not directly related to any other arguments presented in round. In other words, the truth (or falsity) of another major argument would not have much bearing on the truth (or falsity) of other arguments. 

For example, if the negative read a case with two contentions, one about the massive fiscal cost of single-payer healthcare and the other about the deleterious effects that single-payer would have on medical innovation writ large, then the negative could respond to the affirmative case with the argument about wait times and that would be external from the contentions in the negative case. In other words, the affirmative debater couldn’t defeat all the negative contentions with a single response. Just because single-payer might not increase wait times has very little bearing on whether it would decimate the economy or tank medical innovation. Here, the negative has diversified their offense—giving them multiple paths to victory in the 2NR. 

Now, how does this relate to thinking forward? One thing that you must consider when writing your negative case is whether the arguments in your negative case will heavily overlap with the responses that you will make against most common affirmative arguments. In other words, is the negative case external to the turns and other responses that you might make against common affirmative arguments? You want to think forward to see if you will accidentally duplicate or overlap in terms of arguments. The best negative cases are often the ones that are entirely external to other common negative arguments. 

Conclusion

To summarize, here are some of the practical takeaways you should leave with: 

1. The last 30 seconds of your final rebuttal should be verbatim what the judge writes for their RFD. 
2. Think backwards—know what the ideal winning 2AR or 2NR sounds like and write your case to set up that final rebuttal speech. Ask yourself whether the case sets up an argument that can win the debate. 
3. Think forwards—you shouldn’t need a single new piece of evidence in the subsequent rebuttals against the most common responses to your position. 
4. Don’t cross-apply as the negative—that squanders your time advantage. 

So, let’s return to the quote from Trufanov in Elevating the AFF: “While the 1AC is one of the first things I think about, it is also one of the last things I finish.” Why might you want to finish the case last? Because you shouldn’t finish writing the case until you have fully thought through the debate backwards and forwards. 

It’s not until you know exactly what you want to say in the final rebuttal speeches that you should put the finishing touches on your case. It’s not until you know exactly how you want to leverage your affirmative case against common negative positions that you should add the last cards or analytics into your case. 

This doesn’t mean that the case never needs revision, this doesn’t mean that the affirmative case is a finished project, and this doesn’t mean that the strategy can’t change. What it does mean is that you should be intentional with how you write your case. Don’t write it because it’s “cool” or because you like the idea—write the case because it will help you win debates. 

In Part 2 of this miniseries on case writing, I will talk about some other principles of case writing that I also find to be valuable.

Endnotes

[1] If you’re writing a case for the first time, I’d suggest looking at other resources (such as this one from the Wyoming Debate Roundup on how to write a PF case, this video from Debate Drills, the Introduction to Lincoln-Douglas Debate textbook from Victory Briefs Classroom, or the free Lincoln-Douglas Textbook provided by the NSDA written by Dr. Seth Halvorson & Cherian Koshy).

Larry Tech Tips: Mac Edition by Lawrence Zhou

Lawrence Zhou is currently a Fulbright Taiwan Debate Coach and Trainer and an assistant coach at Apple Valley High School. He was formerly the Director of Lincoln-Douglas Debate at the Victory Briefs Institute and the 2014 NSDA National Champion in Lincoln-Douglas Debate. 

In this article, Lawrence covers a bunch of tips and resources that debaters should be familiar with when debating with the dreaded Mac including how to use Verbatim, how to improve window management on the Mac, and why you should change many of your Mac settings. 

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Learning how to effectively use the technological tools at your disposal is one of the more underrated skills in both life and debate. While some of these tips and resources may only make a small difference at first, they translate into very long-term gains. If, for example, each piece of advice I offer here only yields a 1% improvement in efficiency, that still adds up to a large gain in efficiency over time. Consequently, I think being more technologically literate is one of the best investments a debater can make when trying to improve at debate—small changes now can make a massive difference over the course of weeks, months, or even years. 

I doubt I’m breaking any new ground here by discussing some tech tips for debating on a Mac, but I recently watched a video by the YouTube channel Snazzy Labs, a tech review channel, called Amazing FREE Mac Apps You Aren’t Using! which introduced a browser for Mac called Orion and this radically changed my mind on the viability of debating with a Mac (and I’ll explain why later). 

It’s no secret that most debaters recognize that debating on a Windows laptop is generally a superior experience compared to debating on a Mac. The Verbatim experience (mostly due to the fact that Microsoft Office on Mac is noticeably inferior compared to the Windows version) and windows management stand out to me as among the chief reasons why I always preferred debating on a PC compared to a Mac. 

For a while, using a Mac was just generally a bad idea. Those horrible butterfly keyboards and inefficient Intel processors made using a Mac a pretty unenjoyable experience all around. However, with the introduction of Apple Silicon and the incredibly powerful, yet remarkably efficient, ARM processors in 2020, MacBooks are not just a reasonable competitor to excellent Windows devices like the Dell XPS series, but rather are the new standard by which every other laptop must now be compared. When the MacBook Air 2020 running the new M1 chip dropped in 2020, it blew most of the competition out of the water, offering an affordable, powerful, and long-lasting laptop that simply couldn’t be rivaled by any comparably priced Windows laptop. 

Even two years after launch, the MacBook Air 2020 version still tops many lists of best laptops for students from sites like CNET, Engadget, Tech Radar, and others. It’s so good that it led tech reviewer Dave2D to proclaim that The MacBook Is Getting Too Good. I personally love my Macbook Air for its lightweight design, all-day battery life, and reasonably powerful processor. In fact, when people ask me for laptop recommendations, I don’t hesitate to recommend the 2020 M1 Macbook Air (especially with education pricing, which knocks quite a bit off the pricing) even today given its low price and incredible longevity (however, I wouldn’t recommend the newer M2 MacBook Air due to its weird pricing—either save a bunch and go for a refurbished 2020 MacBook Air or upgrade to a MacBook Pro imo). 

For better or for worse, I expect that many students will continue debating with Macs for the foreseeable future, so instead of doing what I normally do at camp when I see someone debating with a Mac (which is to say “boooo!” while giving a thumbs down), I’ll actually give some advice on debating with a Mac that I’ve found to be useful. 

In this article (yes, the name of the article is a riff on Linus Tech Tips), I’m going to first introduce some tips and resources for debating on a Mac. This article is not meant to be comprehensive—that’s where the resources come in, which will cover many small things that I don’t cover explicitly in my tips section. 

Tips

In this section, I will cover some tips that I think make debating on a Mac substantially easier. There is no real rhyme or reason to the organization here—I’m just going to list a bunch of tips that I think could make debating on a Mac easier. 

Verbatim

One of the biggest annoyances with debating on a Mac is Verbatim. It’s just not as good as the Windows version. It feels more clunky, some features are missing, and it’s just generally inferior. However, with enough practice and a little bit of tweaking, debating with Verbatim can be doable. 

If you’re already using Verbatim, great! I would strongly recommend Trufanov’s lecture on debating with a Mac here (also below in the Resources section) for a more advanced look on how to navigate Verbatim on a Mac. For example, you might have encountered that pesky F6 problem or not be aware of all the hidden features in the Mac version of Verbatim that you might find on the Windows version—Trufanov’s lecture covers those and more! 

If you’re not already using Verbatim, what are you doing?!? I know that some people debate off of a school-provided Chromebook, so they are forced to use Google Docs (which does have a Verbatim-like template called Debate Template), but if you can use Verbatim—which requires Microsoft Office—you should. For some reason, I’ve encountered a lot of resistance to using Verbatim from JV debaters who, I assume, are just succumbing to the status quo bias, unwilling to change their habits. Just use Verbatim—there’s a reason why so many competitive debaters use it. It makes both out-of-round preparation (it makes cutting cards and organizing files so much easier) and in-round debating (the speech doc function alone is life changing) so much easier. 

There are tons of excellent videos online introducing how to use Verbatim, including this one from the Digital Speech and Debate Initiative here, this one from GDS here, and this one from Debate Drills here (some of the lectures use a PC—because Windows is obviously superior—but a lot of the core functionality won’t significantly differ from the Mac version).  

There are a bunch of tips and tricks for using Verbatim out there. I won’t highlight them all here because they are available in the resources linked below and you should watch/read the videos/articles. 

Oh, one more thing—by default, the function keys (F1-F12) on a Mac are set to control system features, e.g., adjust screen brightness or the volume, but if you want to set it so that the function keys operate as standard F1-F12 keys for the purposes of using them as Verbatim shortcuts, go to "System Preferences," "Keyboard," and select "Use F1, F2, etc. keys as standard function keys."

Orion and Extensions

This is the thing that more-or-less convinced me that debating with a Mac is feasible. Orion is a browser built specifically for Mac that is currently in its beta (although it’s more than stable enough to use as your main browser). While it looks very similar to Safari, it has one neat trick up its sleeve—it can support Firefox and Chrome browser extensions natively. It doesn’t hurt that it’s also incredibly privacy-focused. 

Why does this matter? 

Google Chrome is still the dominant browser by a wide margin in part due to its quick speed and massive Chrome Web Store that contains so many useful extensions including for debate. However, there are two massive downsides to using Chrome on Mac—the incredibly high RAM usage and the massive hit to battery life. While there are ways to reduce the amount of RAM that Chrome uses and ways to lessen the hit to battery life, it’s still pretty noticeable (I often see my MacBook Air’s battery life cut in half if I have a dozen or more Chrome tabs running). Yet, the snappy speed and numerous extensions available on Chrome has kept me tethered to using Chrome on my Mac. 

Orion may feel a little less comfortable to use than Chrome because it looks and feels like Safari, which has its fair share of critics. I personally find the tab management in Safari to be less intuitive than Chrome. However, the main thing that I’ve missed on Safari is access to the Chrome Web Store and its wide selection of extensions. 

There are six, in particular, that I cannot live without: 

1. Cite Creator. If you haven’t heard of this extension before, it’s an incredibly powerful tool made by the same people that make Verbatim. It automatically generates citations on pages that makes cutting cards so much faster. (A word of caution: Many of the citations it generates are incorrect and I frequently open documents that contain citations from Cite Creator that are either completely incorrect or improperly formatted, so it’s always the responsibility of the person cutting the card to ensure that the citation is accurate and conforms to NSDA evidence standards.) 
2. Video Speed Controller. I simply cannot stand watching most videos at 1x speed (it’s just too slow) and the built-in YouTube player only goes up to 2x speed. This Chrome extension allows me to watch videos at any speed I want, with granular control over the speed and a host of other keyboard shortcuts that makes watching videos so much more efficient. 
3. uBlock Origin. If you don’t know what this is… While there are many content blockers out there, uBlock is among the more popular for a reason. 
4. OneTab. This extension converts open webpages in a browser window into a list that can be opened later, saving on computing resources and helping to reduce browser clutter (I frequently have over 100 tabs open on my desktop PC—a bad habit—but I cannot afford to be so liberal with the number of tabs I keep open on my laptop, so this is a life saver). 
5. LastPass. Everyone needs a password manager and while I think that most people should use 1Password (recommended by The Wirecutter!), I just haven’t had the time to migrate over, so I'm still using LastPass. 
6. UnPaywall. This extension lets you bypass paywalls on tens of millions of peer reviewed articles. 

These extensions, and others, have kept me crawling back to Chrome on my Mac, even as I watched the battery life drain before my eyes. 

That’s where Orion (available here) comes in. Because it can natively support Chrome and Firefox extensions, I can get the benefits of Safari (less resource usage) with the benefits of Chrome extensions.

While Orion isn’t going to be for everyone (do your own research—it is still in its beta stage), I could see this being a very serious contender for a replacement for Chrome for me. I’ve spent the better part of this morning closing out my Chrome tabs and reopening them in Orion as well as migrating my bookmarks over to Orion. If you’re like me and really like your Chrome extensions, consider Orion (and if you’re on PC, consider switching from Chrome to Microsoft Edge—seriously)! 

The biggest drawback to Orion for me is the tab management—I just don't think it's quite as good as Chrome's, but it's something that I think I'll learn to live with if it means I can squeeze a lot more battery life out of my machine. I also suspect I'll still return to Chrome quite frequently, but having the flexibility of multiple browsers seems like a good thing to me.

Searching Files

One of my favorite PC apps is Search Everything (if you have a PC and aren’t using it, you’re really missing out) as it allows me to quickly find any file I need. While Spotlight on Mac is reasonably powerful, it does fall short in a few ways. If you’re looking for a more comprehensive search tool, I’d suggest looking into Alfred or Raycast for Mac. 

But if the only thing you want is a tool to find your debate files faster, I’d strongly recommend EasyFind, available here: https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/11076/easyfind. EasyFind is similar to Search Everything in that it finds files and folders by name while still being fast and light on system resources. Type in the name of a file you’re looking for and EasyFind will find it in seconds. 

Another alternative is DocFetcher but I find EasyFind to be more aesthetically pleasing and more intuitive to use. 

One thing to note is that most search applications are not particularly good at indexing Google Drive files. While many people are familiar with the browser version of Google Drive and the desktop app of Dropbox, what a lot of people don’t know is that Google Drive also has a desktop app (available here) that turns Google Drive into a Dropbox equivalent (instructors for installing it here). Personally, I prefer Google Drive for Desktop because it has a higher base storage than Dropbox, its plans are more reasonably priced (Google One costs only $19.99 a year for 100 GB of storage while Dropbox plans are comparably far pricer), and Google Drive also natively supports Google apps such as Google Docs and Google Slides. However, neither Spotlight nor EasyFind are very good at finding Google Drive files on the Mac unless the Google Drive application is set to “Mirror files” instead of “Stream files.” 

Magnet

One thing that Mac is obviously worse at than PC is window management. If you have iMessage, Discord, Slack, Messenger, a few Finder windows, Spotify, a few Orion windows, and a few PDFs open on a single desktop, good luck finding what you need in a pinch. Even the four finger swipe up to show Mission Control doesn’t help all that much when each window becomes too small to see and grouped in an unpredictable way. Though the multiple desktops feature is convenient, it’s no substitute for effective windows management and should be used more as a way to segregate different tasks (e.g., one desktop for debate, one desktop for school, one desktop for creative applications, etc.). On top of that, all the windows of different applications tend to just sit on top of each other, with no clear way to see what’s open and what’s not, and the full-screen feature (clicking the green button) is basically worthless to me. 

By contrast, Windows has an incredible windows management system, especially with the FancyZones utility that I have come to rely on. Just drag an application over to the side of the screen and it automatically snaps to fill half of the screen. Easy and convenient. Mac has no built-in equivalent. This makes managing windows a nightmare. Trying to manually resize a window to create a split screen view is clumsy and takes ages. 

That’s where Magnet comes in. Though it costs $7.99 on the Mac Store, I’ve found that no free alternative comes anywhere close to the consistency and versatility that Magnet offers. As one reviewer writes, “Magnet is the one Mac app I absolutely can't live without.” Magnet allows you to quickly resize windows, snap windows to the edge, and create automatic 50/50 split screen views using either intuitive keyboard shortcuts or touchpad controls. This one app does so much that I’m surprised it’s not natively integrated into Mac because it makes navigating my Mac so much easier. 

The Dock

In this video, Snazzy Labs walks through a bunch of settings that you should change on your Mac. While I personally haven’t implemented every change he recommends, the one that you should immediately change now concerns the dock. Go to this timestamp to see what basic changes you should make to your dock and to this timestamp to see how to change it so that the dock hides faster and without that pesky animation. For convenience, I’ve posted the Terminal code below that you can paste in to make the suggested changes. 

𝗙𝗮𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗗𝗼𝗰𝗸 𝗛𝗶𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴: defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-delay -float 0; defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-time-modifier -int 0;killall Dock

𝗙𝗮𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗗𝗼𝗰𝗸 𝗛𝗶𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗨𝗻𝗱𝗼: defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-delay -float 0.5; defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-time-modifier -int 0.5 ;killall Dock

𝗔𝗱𝗱 𝗗𝗼𝗰𝗸 𝗦𝗽𝗮𝗰𝗲𝗿 (paste for each spacer): defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-apps -array-add '{tile-data={}; tile-type="spacer-tile";}' && killall Dock

𝗔𝗱𝗱 𝗛𝗮𝗹𝗳-𝗛𝗲𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁 𝗗𝗼𝗰𝗸 𝗦𝗽𝗮𝗰𝗲𝗿 (paste for each): defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-apps -array-add '{"tile-type"="small-spacer-tile";}' && killall Dock

A Mouse

I personally find it very difficult to cut cards with the trackpad on Mac. I think a good mouse can help with that. The key is that the mice should have programmable buttons on the side that you can map to the macros in Verbatim. I also strongly prefer wireless mice (either with a dongle or Bluetooth) since the wires really get in my way, especially when I’m traveling. 

I personally recommend the Logitech MX Anywhere 3 for Mac (available at Best Buy here) for traveling as its lightweight and compact design coupled with excellent surface tracking and programmable buttons makes it an easy pick, and the Logitech MX Master 3 for Mac (available at Best Buy here). I have the non-Mac versions of both myself because I use my mice for both my PC and Mac. However, I recognize that the price tag for this mouse can be a bit steep (though I personally feel that it’s worth it), so any cheap mouse with programmable buttons should suffice.

Director of Debate at the University of Wyoming Matthew Liu suggests a cheap gamer mouse (such as this one) in his Debate Tech Tips article (also linked in the Resources section below). There are tons of gaming mice with 12 buttons (sometimes called MMO mice) that could work. While I think that a 12 button mouse could be very useful, I personally think that a 2 button mouse is still a good option. Good options that won’t break the bank include the Logitech M270 Triathlon, the Logitech M590, or the Corsair Harpoon, but there are tons of options out there and lots of resources and guides to buying the right mouse for your budget. 

Grammarly

You’ve probably seen a lot of ads for Grammarly somewhere and while I think that Grammarly is not nearly as good as its ads make it out to be, I think it’s an incredible tool that every student should be using. While its application to debate may be somewhat limited, it’s an invaluable tool that can noticeably improve the quality of your writing generally. In fact, half of the grading I did for the undergraduate course COJO 2095: Persuasive Argumentation was just running papers through Grammarly and noting the obvious grammar and spelling errors. While most students can probably live off of the free version of Grammarly, I did get the paid version of Grammarly while working on my thesis and found it quite helpful. Grammarly is available in multiple forms such as a desktop application, web application, or a browser extension. 

TextExpander

Using some version of a text expander is discussed in both this post by Marshall Thompson (now Bierson) and this post by Matthew Liu. While I haven’t started using it regularly, it is an incredibly valuable tool that I would consider looking into. There is a TextExpander app for Mac available here: https://textexpander.com/download. 

Resources

Of course, there are so many excellent resources out there on debating with your Mac that I don’t want to duplicate, so I’ll list them below for your convenience. 

Debate Specific Resources

1. DDI 2022 - How to Use Your Computer (Mac Edition) - Trufanov: https://youtu.be/IhZQr1ZP_h8. If you watch nothing else on how to debate with a Mac, I would strongly recommend you watch this lecture. Yes, it’s going to be dry—how can you make talking about Verbatim code interesting—but it contains tons of tips and tricks that will be useful to both novice and varsity debaters alike. The lecture covers lots of Mac specific Verbatim tricks, assorted settings to use, and just all-around good advice for making the most of your Mac. You can find the handout to follow along to this lecture here (I’ve created a copy of this document here in case the original document disappears).  
2. Debate Tech Tips: https://wyodebateroundup.weebly.com/blog/debate-tech-tips. This great article by Matthew Liu is a great one-stop shop for getting all the basic tech tips needed for debate. It covers Verbatim, OCR programs, and more! One caveat: Don’t use The Great Suspender as it’s malware. I use OneTab instead. 
3. Technology Tips: Verbatim and More!: https://www.girlsdebate.org/general-resources-1/2020/12/4/technology-tips-verbatim-and-more. This is another simple guide to debating in general, with a lot of the advice being applicable for Mac users. Again, ignore the recommendation for The Great Suspender. 

General Mac Tips

1. Amazing FREE Mac Apps You Aren’t Using!: https://youtu.be/FxUk8gxzHI8. I downloaded most of these apps as I was watching this video. I already mentioned Orion above, but I found Hidden Bar (which hides a lot of the icons cluttering up your bar), Shottr (an obviously superior screen clipping tool compared to the built-in one), and Later (which either hides or closes all the windows on your desktop with the click of a button) to be especially useful. 
2. 20 Mac Apps I Can't Live Without!: https://youtu.be/h2xoRkzjQoc. I hadn’t heard of most of these apps before and while I personally didn’t see a need for some of these apps, some of them are incredibly powerful and it’s worth giving the video a quick walkthrough to see if any of these apps could help you in your daily life. I especially like Dropzone (which makes it easy to transfer files on a Mac), TextSniper (a solid OCR program), and ImageOptim (which quickly compresses images and files).
3. 25 Mac Settings You Have to Change: https://youtu.be/psPgSN1bPLY. Yet another video by Snazzy Labs, this covers some useful Mac settings to change to improve your productivity on the Mac. In particular, I think the tips about modifying the dock are incredibly useful. 
4. 150+ Mac Tips and Tricks: https://youtu.be/9Lz7jliEvGg. The name says it all—over 180 tips on how to more efficiently use your Mac. While a little dated, most of the advice still applies. 

There are endless resources on using a Mac out there and I obviously cannot list them all here, but I think that these four videos were the ones that I found the most useful among the dozens of articles I’ve read and videos I’ve watched on this subject. 

Conclusion

I think that technological literacy is one of the most underrated debate skills out there. Being able to efficiently use the technological tools at your disposal can drastically speed up the rate at which you do debate work, either freeing up more leisure time or enabling you to do even more debate work! While there are things I wasn’t able to cover in this article, there are tons of resources out there on how to get better at debating on a Mac and I hope that this has been a good introduction to many of those resources. 

Back to Basics: The Counterplan in Traditional LD by Lawrence Zhou

Lawrence Zhou is currently a Fulbright Taiwan Debate Coach and Trainer and an assistant coach at Apple Valley High School. He was formerly the Director of Lincoln-Douglas Debate at the Victory Briefs Institute. 

In this article, Lawrence presents his case for why counterplans are legitimate in traditional Lincoln-Douglas settings. He briefly explains what a counterplan is, refutes some of the arguments against counterplans in traditional Lincoln-Douglas debate, and provides some links to resources that may help debaters learn more about counterplans and how to deploy them in more traditional settings. 

Updated: 8-19-2022—Updated section on NCFL rules

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Now that the 2022-2023 season is underway, I'm hoping to see an uptick in new participants (the trends suggesting that there were fewer competitors that competed more frequently were not healthy for long-term debate participation). While many series exist on how to improve at the novice and varsity level (for example, Raffi Piliero published a number of articles on Briefly that I think are worth a read), I find that the number of resources available to more traditional or JV level debaters is a little lacking.

In that spirit, I'm launching a monthly blog series here on Briefly called "Back to Basics" which will cover issues that I think are more advanced than what you might want to teach at the novice level but frequently ignored when instructing students at the second- or third-year level. There exists a number of basic skills and concepts that I think are easy to take for granted after years in this activity that are worth covering explicitly. This month, I'll be covering the logic of counterplans in more traditional circuits and releasing a second follow up article about principles of good case writing next month.

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In my recent topic analysis essay for the September/October 2022 Lincoln-Douglas topic, I launched into a mildly lengthy diatribe about why counterplans are obviously logical arguments that should be included in debate. This is a continuation of my similar rants in many of the topic analysis essays I write for Public Forum debate topics, especially as counterplans are also starting to find purchase in PF. In fact, camp director Chris Theis and several other Public Forum admins have repeatedly given an elective at camp called “Counterplans in PF” (available as a lecture as part of Victory Briefs Classroom) in which they argue that counterplans should be included in Public Forum (a take I wholeheartedly agree with). 

To those that have more familiarity with counterplans in debate, this conclusion seems banal, perhaps offensively obvious—clearly counterplans should be included in debate! However, every year that I teach at camp, I interact with a significant number of debaters from fairly conservative or traditional circuits who stress that counterplans are barred in their local circuits either formally (i.e., forbidden by the rules) or informally (i.e., the judges that populate that circuit are unlikely to be sympathetic to the introduction of counterplans and so unlikely to vote for them). 

Typically, I find the reasons proffered to be unpersuasive, relying on either false factual premises or specious reasoning that could be a textbook case of what a logical fallacy is. However, many coaches and competitors still hold the view that, for some reason or another, counterplans don’t belong in debate. While I doubt this essay will be the nail in the coffin against the many bad reasons barring counterplans in debate, I do want to summarize some of the more common arguments against counterplans and explain why I find them ultimately unpersuasive. Hopefully, this may sway a student or two reading this or at least provide the necessary ammunition to debate with others on this issue (as I find this “are counterplans legitimate or not” debate to be one of the more common ones I have with students from more traditional circuits). 

On the one hand, nothing that I say here should be that complicated or original; on the other hand, I do think many debaters from more local or traditional circuits haven’t been exposed to these arguments. Since I think that one of debate’s many values is exposing students to viewpoints that they haven’t heard or deeply considered before, I hope that even ardent opponents of counterplans can at least consider what I argue here and engage the argument on its merits before just discarding what I have to say. And to students reading this because you’re not sure if counterplans belong in debate, it’s my hope that you can use some of what’s written here to help develop your own thoughts as to what a counterplan is and why it’s a justified argument that ought to be included within all styles of debate, including traditional LD debate. 

I expect that many debaters from more traditional circuits will be familiar with the term “counterplan” but lack actual knowledge of the logic of a counterplan. In order to make my case for counterplans, it is unnecessary to know the nitty-gritty details of what a counterplan is (although I’ll provide resources at the end that should help explain what a counterplan is in greater detail); all that is needed is a basic idea of the logic behind a counterplan. 

In this essay, I want to briefly introduce what a counterplan is, why the arguments against counterplans in traditional Lincoln-Douglas debate are ultimately unpersuasive to me, and provide some links to resources that may help debaters learn more about counterplans and how to deploy them in more traditional settings. 

What is a Counterplan? 

There are a variety of definitions of counterplans floating around out there. Many of those definitions merely aim to capture what a counterplan is often trying to do (e.g., many definitions of counterplan revolve around the idea that they are trying to “solve the AFF case”¹). For example, the NSDA textbook on policy debate Debate 101: Everything You Need to Know About Policy Debate: You Learned Here by Bill and Will Smelko says: 

What is a COUNTERPLAN? Easy, a COUNTERPLAN is a proposal offered by the negative that solves the significant problem(s) that the affirmative claims to exist and that creates some “net benefit” making it better at the end of the debate if the judge votes negative and prefers the COUNTERPLAN to the affirmative plan. Understanding how to debate COUNTERPLANS is immensely more complicated than the simplicity of the term’s definition.

Debate 101, p. 23

Ignoring the policy-specific jargon of “plan” and “net benefit” for a second, the basic logic here is that the negative is allowed to propose a change just like the affirmative is allowed to propose a change (that change being the one indicated in the resolution). The reasoning for this? That it would be unfair for the affirmative to be able to solve some of the harms that exist now (e.g., the lack of access to healthcare on this current single-payer topic) while the negative is restricted from also solving this harm. 

This, I think, is the wrong way to think about counterplans at their core.² These definitions don’t really attempt to get at what a counterplan is (although these definitions are far better than some of the misconceptions surrounding counterplans, see here for a particularly egregious example of an article from the NCFCA that clearly doesn't understand counterplans). And I think that the only real basis for allowing or disallowing a type of argument is simply whether the argument itself is logical, not extraneous considerations of “fairness” or “education” (for what is more fair and educational than considering logical arguments in the first place?). 

So, what is a counterplan really? 

At its core, a counterplan is nothing more than an opportunity cost. The concept of an opportunity cost might be a foreign one, so it’s worth explaining what an opportunity cost is. If you Google the definition, it’s defined as “the loss of potential gain from other alternatives when one alternative is chosen.” 

We consider opportunity costs all the time—when we decide whether to go out to eat, whether to study, whether to make that impulse shopping purchase, etc. Each and every time, we’re considering whether we’re giving up something of greater value when we make a decision. Should you go out to eat if you could stay home and cook instead? Should you study now or go hang out with your friends? Should you make that impulse shopping purchase or save for something else later? 

Each of these decisions requires you to weigh the relevant opportunity costs—is the potential gain of choosing another alternative (whether it be staying home to cook, hanging out with friends, or saving your money) greater than the gain of choosing the original option? If the answer is yes, then don’t take that course of action! If you think it’s better to stay home to cook than go out to eat, better to hang out with friends than to study, or to save your money than spend it all now, then you should not go out to eat, study, or make that impulse purchase. 

Notice how the concept of an opportunity cost—an idea central to the entire field of economics—is nothing more than a logical argument against taking one course of action. It is not some artificial debate construct, but rather a logical extension of how we ought to make decisions. 

If that still doesn’t make it super obvious what a counterplan is, maybe this example will help: 

Larry is considering what to have for lunch today. He only has an hour to get lunch before he needs to be back in the classroom teaching. There are two options nearby: a Chipotle a block to the east and an In-N-Out Burger a block to the west. While Chipotle has guac and burritos, In-N-Out has animal style fries and the double-double burger. Chipotle would be more expensive, but the In-N-Out line is also substantially longer. Where should Larry go eat lunch? Should Larry eat at the Chipotle or the In-N-Out? 

Typically, people might make a pros-and-cons list to decide where to eat. Weigh up the pros and cons for each restaurant and consider which one wins! This is similar to how a debater might propose an argument in a debate round. Suppose Debater Ashley is tasked with arguing in favor of Chipotle. They argue that Chipotle is a good option because Larry is currently hungry and needs food. 

Debater Nathan might choose to respond by arguing that Chipotle is bad because it costs money or because of the risk of getting a food borne illness from the establishment. Ashley points out that the cost of Chipotle isn’t a lot, that the risk of getting sick from Chipotle isn’t very high, and that both costs are acceptable because of how hungry Larry is. Nathan seems to be in a losing position. 

In a typical traditional LD debate round, this is Nathan’s only available strategy—because he is not allowed to advocate for alternatives, Nathan can only argue that eating at Chipotle is worse for Larry than not eating at all, a losing strategy because, in general, the importance of hunger will outweigh the loss of a few dollars or the small risk of getting food poisoning. 

However, in the real world, it seems obvious that Nathan has a better set of arguments available—the counterplan to go to In-N-Out instead! Nathan points out that Ashley has only argued that Chipotle is good because Larry is currently hungry and needs food. Nathan agrees to the fact that Larry is hungry, but correctly identifies that such a fact isn’t a strong reason to get Chipotle—why not just go eat somewhere else instead? Why does it have to be Chipotle? 

In fact, Nathan argues, we should go to In-N-Out because Larry really likes animal style fries and that’s something Chipotle doesn’t have (sidenote: the animal style fries are overrated, just like In-N-Out is). Here, Nathan has given a strong argument against going to Chipotle—Larry can only choose one option, and since both options solve the hunger problem, In-N-Out is the clear choice because it also has animal style fries. 

In other words, Nathan has pointed out an opportunity cost—if Larry had chosen to go to Chipotle, he would’ve missed out on the potential benefits of going to In-N-Out, namely missing out on those animal style fries. Here, the opportunity to eat animal style fries represents the opportunity cost to eating at Chipotle. Consequently, it should be easy to understand why a counterplan is a logical argument for the negative to advance. All it’s doing is pointing out one of the fundamental parts of economics—the consideration of opportunity costs. It should be obvious that pointing out that In-N-Out is superior is a reason to negate Ashley’s proposal of going to Chipotle. 

If you’re still a little confused about the logic of opportunity costs, I’d watch this video from Marginal Revolution, this one from Khan Academy, or this one from EconClips. There are also some explainer articles like this one from Econlib, this one from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, and trusty ole Wikipedia. 

This is as real-world and logical as it gets. Take the central debate on this single-payer universal healthcare topic. It’s not enough that the affirmative demonstrates that single-payer is one way to achieve universal coverage—the affirmative should prove that single-payer is superior to the existence of alternative health systems. For example, one of the core debates in the Democratic primaries was between more “progressive” healthcare proposals like Medicare For All and more “moderate” healthcare proposals like expanding Obamacare. 

Just like it would silly to force the Nathan to negate the “go to Chipotle” AFF just with contentions about why Chipotle is bad in a vacuum (e.g., it costs money or it might make you sick)—an unwinnable strategy because those arguments probably don’t outweigh the importance of hunger, it is silly to force negative debaters in traditional LD to negate the single-payer good AFF with just reasons why single-payer is bad in a vacuum—also probably an unwinnable strategy given just how bad our current healthcare system is. Just like it would be silly to say that Nathan advocating to go to In-N-Out is somehow illogical or unfair in a debate about whether Larry should eat at Chipotle, it would be silly to say negative debaters advocating for the public option is somehow illogical or unfair in a debate about healthcare reform. 

In summary, counterplans are not some artificial debate convention, but are instead arguments that naturally follow from the logic of opportunity costs. Counterplans merely aim to demonstrate that the opportunity cost of affirming is greater than the gain of affirming. 

Why Should Counterplans Be Allowed? 

The threshold to meet to bar an argument should be pretty high. In general, I’m quite sympathetic to the view that the only legitimate constraint on what arguments can be introduced in debate is merely whether they meet some baseline standard of logical coherence. One would need to think the argument is so illogical or ridiculous that teaching it would be antithetical to the pedagogical goals of the activity or just so blatantly offensive (e.g., racist, sexist, homophobic, etc.) that barring it would be needed to protect the safety of students in the activity. I can’t really think of very many other conditions that would justify flatly barring a type of argument otherwise—that, I think, sets the threshold for barring counterplans in debate pretty high. Unless the opponent of counterplans can demonstrate that counterplans are so obviously bad for the educational value of the activity (and even that wouldn’t be particularly convincing considering the number of patently false arguments that win debates nowadays) or student safety, I think the default rests strongly with their inclusion rather than their exclusion. 

Additionally, arguments need not be ruled out on theoretical grounds—they can be dealt with merely by pointing out the absence of a warrant. For example, if one were deeply persuaded by the objection that counterplans simply don’t negate the resolution, I would not see this as a strong reason to bar counterplans generally—I would only see this as a reason why the affirmative debater should advance that objection in a rebuttal speech. For reasons elaborated upon by debate coach Jacob Nails in “Two Dogmas of Fiat,” I think it’s silly to appeal to the “rules of debate” to bar certain arguments when simply pointing out why the argument is substantively weak would suffice. Similarly, if one thought that counterplans were merely bad arguments, I wouldn’t think of that as a strong reason to prohibit counterplans wholesale—just a great response for the affirmative debater to make in the rebuttal speech. 

Consequently, I think the case for counterplans in traditional LD is fairly straightforward—they are logical arguments that negate the resolution and so they ought to be included. I would think that the opponent of counterplans in traditional LD has a high bar to clear—whatever the downside to introducing counterplans in traditional LD is, it has to be important enough to meet the threshold of barring an argument. 

Therefore, I won’t lay out a particularly active case for including counterplans—I don’t think the counterplan needs an active case for its inclusion anymore than I think that the introduction of quoted evidence in debate needs an active case for its inclusion. Rather, I turn now to deflating some of the most common objections to incorporating counterplans in traditional LD circuits. 

What are the Objections to Counterplans? 

Objection 1: Counterplans Violate NSDA Rules

One of the most common charges levied against reading counterplans in traditional settings is that they violate the rules laid out by the National Speech and Debate Association. While it is true that back when the NSDA was still the NFL (National Forensic League), there were some versions of the rules that did technically prohibit the use of counterplans in Lincoln-Douglas debate. However, this rule no longer exists, rendering this objection patently false. 

If you go to the most recent edition of the NSDA’s High School Unified Manual (I’m writing this essay on August 16, 2022, so I am utilizing the version updated on June 2, 2022) and search for the term “counterplan,” you’ll notice that it only shows up three times, all on page 25. For convenience, I’ve posted the entire paragraph in which the results appear (and feel free to check me on this): 

Plans/Counterplans: In Public Forum Debate, the Association defines a plan or counterplan as a formalized, comprehensive proposal for implementation. Neither the pro or con side is permitted to offer a plan or counterplan; rather, they should offer reasoning to support a position of advocacy. Debaters may offer generalized, practical solutions. 

There are a few things to note here. First, notice that this is only in the context of Public Forum Debate, not LD. Already, the idea that reading a counterplan in LD violates some “rule” is based on some antiquated understanding of the rules of LD debate. There is simply no such prohibition on reading counterplans in LD debate. 

Second, even if these rules did somehow translate over to LD, it’s not at all clear that reading a “counterplan” would violate them. Notice that it is defined as a “formalized, comprehensive proposal for implementation.” Most counterplans would not meet that threshold. 

Let’s use the current LD topic (Resolved: The United States ought to implement a single-payer universal healthcare system) as an example. I fail to see how saying something such as, “Contention 2: The public option is superior” and then reading some evidence that suggests that a public option for healthcare would be a superior version of healthcare reform would violate the rule. How would this qualify as a “formalized, comprehensive proposal for implementation”?

In contrast, take a look at the full text of the Medicare For All Act of 2019 proposed by Senator Bernard Sanders. That is something that would probably violate the threshold set forth by the NSDA. Saying, “Maybe we should do something like a public option instead” certainly does not! And if it does violate that threshold, then it’s clear the affirmative would violate it too since they too specify a similar level of detail relative to the counterplan! 

Simply put, there are simply no rules set forth by the NSDA that prohibits counterplans in LD, and even if the rules did apply, “counterplans” as a general category of negative argument would not violate the rules as written. 

Objection 1a: Counterplans Violate NCFL Rules

A commenter on a thread about this article noted that the National Catholic Forensic League (NCFL)—the host of NCFL Grand Nationals, generally considered one of the three major national championships in LD along with the NSDA National Tournament and the Tournament of Champions (TOC)—bars counterplans in debate. I had totally overlooked this and it turns out that on page 9 of the 2022 update of their bylaws, it does indeed prohibit plans and counterplans: 

b. Lincoln-Douglas Debate:

1) The resolution is a proposition of value, not policy. Debaters are to develop argumentation on the resolution in its entirety, based on conflicting underlying principles and values to support their positions. To that end, they are not responsible for practical applications. No plan or counterplan shall be offered by either debater. 

Putting aside the fact that I think this description is mostly nonsensical (e.g., how could one not be responsible for practical applications? That is a patently absurd view that does not align with any real philosophical work), does this description, as written, actually bar counterplans? I think not. 

To illustrate, let me just list a few of the recent NCFL Grand Nationals topics (a shockingly difficult list to construct because there appears to be no actual list of previous NCFL LD topics, hence why some are missing): 

• 2021—Resolved: The U.S. presidency ought to be decided by a national popular vote instead of the electoral college.
• 2019—Resolved: Developed nations have a moral obligation to admit people fleeing oppression.
• 2018—Resolved: Bystanders have a moral obligation to act in the face of injustice.
• 2017—Resolved: The people’s right to know ought to be valued above the government’s need for secrecy.
• 2015—Resolved: When in conflict, international actions to counter terrorism ought to take priority over national interests.
• 2014—Resolved: When in conflict, national security concerns ought to be valued above personal privacy.
• 2013—Resolved: Just societies should never deliberately initiate war.
• 2012—Resolved: The United States ought not to intervene in the political processes of other sovereign nations.
• 2011—Resolved: The United States has a moral obligation to promote just governance in developing nations.
• 2010—Resolved: That the United States government has a moral obligation to afford the same Constitutional rights to all people on United States soil.

The fact that they have not defined what a counterplan is makes it quite difficult to prohibit. As written, I think it’s clear that they conceive of counterplans solely as a potential “policy” alternative. Recall the example of Ashley and Nathan considering which establishment Larry ought to eat lunch at—it’s clear that the “counterplan” of going to In-N-Out is a logical and important counterargument against going to Chipotle while also not being a policy option. Again, if counterplans are nothing more than opportunity costs, then there is nothing that requires counterplans be policy options. All choices involve opportunity costs, counterplans merely point those out, whether they be policies or not. 

Take any of the given resolutions listed above and it’s clear why counterplans should be allowed even when it comes to questions of value not policy. For example, the 2019 topic about admitting people fleeing oppression. First, horrible topic—the negative ground basically amounts to “watching the child drown in the pond is good,” hardly a balanced topic. Second, why isn’t the negative allowed to propose a variety of alternatives to admitting people fleeing from oppression? It seems totally fair and reasonable to allow the negative to say things like, “Even if developed nations don’t have to admit people fleeing oppression, they still can help in other ways such as providing humanitarian aid or coordinating with multilateral institutions to address the issue.” The moral obligation to admit people fleeing oppression may not be quite as strong in the face of other (perhaps more effective) alternatives to address the issue at hand. 

Or take the 2013 topic about never initiating war. I think the negative should obviously be allowed to propose some conditions on which war could be initiated to help avoid common affirmative criticisms of deliberating initiating war. For example, if the affirmative had a contention about deliberating initiating war against countries without a standing army being bad, I would think it’s reasonable for the negative to say, “Hey, maybe don’t do that, but that’s not a reason to affirm because I don’t think I need to prove it’s always okay to deliberating initiate war, just that it’s okay in some limited circumstances such as to stop genocide.” 

Really, take any topic debated at NCFL Grand Nationals in the last decade and you can see that they all encourage counterplans of some sort, and—most importantly—none of those counterplans are “policies” per se. Instead, they are merely pointing out an opportunity cost to affirming, a relevant consideration in both ethics and policy making! 

Objection 2: Counterplans Are Illogical 

I admit that I truly do not understand this objection, making it difficult for me to give a particularly good-faith summary of it. However, what I think people are trying to say when they make this argument is something akin to “Proving that the counterplan is good doesn’t prove the resolution is false.” 

If this is the sentiment being expressed, then I wholeheartedly agree! Demonstrating that a counterplan is good does not, by itself, demonstrate that the resolution is false (or that whatever the affirmative proposals is undesirable). For example, if the negative proposed a counterplan of “The United States should end world hunger” on this healthcare topic, I think the affirmative should (correctly) point out that the counterplan is not a persuasive reason to negate the resolution. In other words, the affirmative should point out that the counterplan isn’t a real “opportunity cost” (in debate jargon, we might say that the affirmative debater should “permute” or “perm” the counterplan, arguing that the United States could both implement single-payer and end world hunger). 

Consequently, while we agree on the problem—counterplans that aren’t competitive—we clearly disagree on the resolution. My solution is simple—the affirmative should point out that many counterplans simply are not an opportunity cost! The other solution is far more strained—barring an entire category of arguments that overlooks that many counterplans are, in fact, logical opportunity costs. 

For example, if the negative argues that a single-payer healthcare system would be too expensive and that a public option would similarly ensure universal coverage at a fraction of the cost, that would obviously be an opportunity cost to single-payer! You can’t really have a single-payer healthcare system that eliminates private insurance while simultaneously endorsing a healthcare system that largely preserves private insurance (in debate jargon, we might call this counterplan “mutually exclusive” with the affirmative). 

If the negative demonstrates that a public option is indeed superior to a single-payer system, that would seem to entail that we ought not implement a single-payer healthcare system because the opportunity cost of a public option outweighs the potential gain of a single-payer system. In the same way that proving that In-N-Out is a better place to eat lunch than Chipotle would be a good reason to not eat lunch at Chipotle, this would prove that we ought not implement single-payer. 

Consequently, it seems far more illogical to artificially bracket off considerations of alternatives, especially within the context of healthcare where the main debate is not about single-payer versus no single-payer in a vacuum, but rather about whether single-payer is the best proposed option compared to alternatives like a public option or multi-payer system. 

In summary, I think this objection rests on a conflation of substantive versus theoretical challenges to counterplans. This is the equivalent of saying that because some negative frameworks don’t really disagree with the affirmative framework, we should ban the negative from reading frameworks—this is patently absurd. Clearly, the solution is that we encourage the negative to pick better frameworks that actually disagree with the affirmative’s framework. Similarly, the solution is that we encourage negative debaters to pick counterplans that actually demonstrate a relevant opportunity cost, not to ban them wholesale. 

While many counterplans do not present actual opportunity costs to affirming, that is a reason those are bad counterplans, not a reason why counterplans are bad. 

Objection 3: Counterplans Turn LD Into Policy

It seems to me that many of the coaches and judges that seem to despise counterplans are ones that are (rightfully) concerned about devolution of LD into one-on-one policy debate. Given that the language of a “counterplan” itself already sounds suspiciously like the domain of policy debate, I can sympathize with this concern. As much as I think that policy debate has immense educational value to offer (e.g., see Becca Rothfeld’s piece here, my piece here, or this study here), I also recognize that other debate styles teach valuable skills (e.g., Lincoln-Douglas represents a particularly unique avenue to teach philosophy). I do not want to see all debate flattened into policy debate, especially because the barriers to entry for policy debate remain largely inaccessible for many students across the country. 

For now, I’ll separate out the two concerns—I’ll tackle whether the introduction of counterplans does actually trade off with other forms of education such as philosophical debate later. For now, I’ll address the more surface level concern that counterplans make LD into policy. 

Ultimately, I think this objection is nothing more than guilt by association. Policy debate also has norms of reading evidence and doing research—is it now the case that is also bad? This is simply throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It is incumbent upon the critic of counterplans to demonstrate something uniquely bad with counterplans themselves rather than trying to handwave them away by saying the words “policy, scary.” I am not the biggest fan of policy-style debating myself (do students really need to know how to comprehend someone spreading at 450 wpm to gain real-world skills?). However, I am a big fan of logical arguments and this objection simply isn’t one. 

How does the introduction of counterplans lead to more “policy-style” debating? Why would this necessarily encourage debaters to start doing silly things like spreading, introducing technically complex arguments like topicality, or reading kritiks? I simply don’t see how this would be the case. It’s not like arguing about a counterplan requires immense debate jargon—it merely requires the negative to logically explain why a counterplan presents a valid opportunity cost. Most real-world debates have counterplans because most real-world discussions recognize that you can’t consider proposals in a vacuum—you have to weigh proposals against each other! Just like the public can broadly understand why politicians debate between different tax reform or health care proposals, so too can the public broadly understand why the negative is saying that some alternative course of action is preferable to the one that the affirmative proposed. 

Objection 4: Counterplans Undermine Philosophical Debating

Similar to the above objection, opponents of counterplans occasionally argue that one reason to bar counterplans is that they trade off with debating broad philosophical principles. By allowing the negative to focus on more nuanced policy questions, that undercuts the importance of developing well-justified philosophical arguments in LD. 

I am quite a fan of philosophy in LD personally (hence why fellow Apple Valley debate coach Nick Smith and I authored a course on philosophy in debate for the NSDA) and I’m also quite a fan of debating the resolution as a general principle (as it was written!). However, as much as I also bemoan the decline of philosophical debating in LD, I don’t find this argument all that persuasive even if it was afforded its full weight. 

First, I largely think that the best way to capture the educational value of debate is to simply debate the resolution. Some topics are going to privilege more principled philosophical debate while some topics will be more favorable for debates that are largely empirical in nature. So long as the community submits a decent spread of topic areas (and the topic committee continues to seek diversity in topic areas in their finalized public list), I think we’ll be fine! 

As debate coach and now Professor of Philosophy Jake Nebel argues that, “I don’t really care for clash-of-civilizations debates between policymakers and philosophers: I think it’s a mistake to privilege, without much empirical evidence, either abstract philosophical debate or concrete public policy debate as more fair or educational than the other. Some approaches are more germane to certain resolutions than they are to others. Most resolutions call for elements of both, but the balance depends on precise aspects of wording.” 

I am inclined to agree—I think it’s a mistake to artificially bracket off one type of education as somehow categorically more valuable than others. Some topics will naturally lend themselves to interesting and literature-based debates about alternatives (e.g., this topic about single-payer) while others naturally draw from a much more philosophical literature base. For example, I think something has gone horribly awry if debaters leave this topic unaware of the differences of single-payer healthcare systems compared to other models of healthcare (I would struggle to think of any philosopher writing on the issue of ethics in healthcare who thought it was fine to simply jettison such concerns from consideration). 

Second, I’m not convinced any such trade off exists. For instance, many debaters who do policy-style debating in LD are actually quite familiar with the intricacies of moral and political philosophy. I’d want to see some empirical evidence that actually validates this trade off hypothesis; otherwise, I have equally strong evidence that the trade off doesn’t exist. 

Third, I could easily see counterplans as facilitating more in-depth philosophical debating. One common affirmative case I saw on this topic was largely Rawlsian in nature. I think the best version of this affirmative case suggested that a right to healthcare emerged from a consideration of the equal liberty principle. However, many affirmative cases largely focused their contentions around the difference principle and the more egalitarian nature of Rawls’ theory, pointing out that access to healthcare is unequal and largely divided along lines of class and race. The weakness of this approach is that merely focusing on the importance of equal and universal access doesn’t provide a strong reason in favor of single-payer healthcare—it just emphasizes the importance of universal coverage which could be achieved in a myriad of ways, e.g., through a public option, regulated market system, or multi-payer system. 

However, in many traditional circuits where counterplans are banned, the affirmative doesn’t need to develop a particularly rigorous defense of the mechanism of single-payer because the negative cannot propose alternative methods to reach universal coverage via a different mechanism. Consequently, this actually worsens the quality of philosophical debating because the affirmative never had to find a good philosophical argument in favor of single-payer beyond the obvious ones about equality. However, if the negative were allowed access to counterplans, that would force the affirmative to be more detail-oriented about their philosophical arguments and encourage them to spend a little more time digging through actual philosophy texts that provide more nuanced arguments. Affirmative debaters would finally have an incentive to pick the more interesting warrants out of their philosophical theory to explain the more nuanced arguments in favor of single-payer specifically. 

Ultimately, I sympathize with this concern, but find it to be largely persuasive enough to scale up to the point of prohibiting counterplans. 

Objection 4a: “Opportunity Cost” Logic Necessarily Undermines Philosophical Debating

I think a similar sentiment is shared when people argue that the term “opportunity costs” is itself already biased in favor of utilitarian ethics and away from non-consequentialist considerations. I think this is incorrect. Even non-utilitarian philosophers consider opportunity costs all the time. How could one even debate about questions in practical ethics without considering opportunity costs? How could any philosopher debate about what “ought” to be done if they arbitrarily disregarded all considerations of opportunity costs? 

One key thing to note here is that “costs” is a broad term, not to be conflated with the more straight-forward usage of “costs” purely in monetary terms. In fact, the whole point of framework in LD is just to identify what counts as a relevant “cost” according to different ethical theories. For example, libertarians emphasize harms to liberty as more “costly” than committed egalitarians who find patterns of inequality to be more “costly.” 

This objection turns out to be nothing more than an equivocation about the term “costs.” 

Objection 4b: Counterplans Detract From General Principle Debating

Similar to the above objection, this version suggests that the introduction of counterplans will force debates into questions about nitty-gritty details at the expense of debating about the resolution as a general principle. 

I think many of the responses I laid out previously apply here. I have no reason to think that the type of thing we’re supposed to be debating is anything other than what’s determined by the topic literature, I’d like to see some empirical evidence of this, and I think that debating about counterplans is often the best way to capture meaningful debates about the general principle. 

To elaborate on the last point, given that the core point of disagreement between two sides on a topic is often not about the existence of a problem but rather about the appropriate solution, it seems odd to artificially bracket off literature-based general principle debates about the best solution to a problem. It seems to make debating about the topic as a general principle more shallow and less nuanced. 

Besides, you can debate about the topic as a general principle against counterplans because you have to debate about the general features of single-payer that make it desirable compared to different healthcare reforms. And you can debate about the topic in the realm of nitty-gritty policy details without counterplans (and many traditional rounds I’ve watched have devolved into shouting matches about the funding source for the affirmative’s proposal, all without the need for counterplans). 

Summary

As I mentioned above, I think that the threshold that one would need to clear for barring an argument is pretty high—I simply don’t see how any of the objections listed gets anywhere close. Rather, I speculate that many of the opponents of counterplans are those that are relying on a few heuristics to rationalize their prior beliefs about the evil nature of counterplans.

Believe me, I’ve seen where the logic of counterplans taken to the extreme can take you (the States CP or other silly counterplans) and I have good reason to not want to end up there. That isn’t a reason not to allow the good in. Any argument can be taken to the extremes. Arguments about the political or public backlash of passing some policy have somehow morphed into nonsensical disadvantages often termed the “politics DA” (which I find to be quite silly). That’s not a reason why arguments about political or public backlash should no longer be considered. 

Counterplans can make traditional interesting and, more importantly, logical and educational. I think it would be a shame if debaters in traditional circuits never got to learn about some of the most important parts of healthcare reform. I think we would be doing students a disservice if they never considered why single-payer healthcare is a superior reform compared to a multi-payer or regulated market system. I think we would be encouraging worse quality debating if affirmative debaters did not have to develop a defense of “single-payer” as opposed to just defending that universal healthcare is good. 

How Do I Learn More About Counterplans? 

The section introducing counterplans was heavily simplified in order to make the basic idea of a counterplan understandable enough to talk about without having to reference unnecessarily advanced jargon or concepts. However, if you wish to learn more about counterplans, there are lots of resources online that can help you learn more about what counterplans are and how to use them in traditional LD settings. I’ve listed some below: 

• Victory Briefs Virtual Classroom: https://classroom.victorybriefs.com/virtual-classroom. There are a great number of lectures and lessons on counterplans and what they entail! They even have a textbook (available here) on basic policy concepts (that I helped co-author) that I think contains a pretty comprehensive introduction to a lot of the logic of policy debate arguments. 
• Intro to Plans and CPs: https://youtu.be/D4fK6-BqCzY. This lecture, given by Jacob Nails at the Victory Briefs Institute in 2017, is a great introduction to what a counterplan is. I have given a similar elective here, but I prefer the way that Nails explains things. 
• Debating Traditionally: https://youtu.be/dhLK7zbhi7U. In this series, I discuss a lot of my core advice for how to leverage technical skills into success in more traditional circuits. In the third part of the series, I have a brief discussion about how to deploy counterplans in more traditional settings. 
• Wyoming Debate Roundup: https://wyodebateroundup.weebly.com/blog/counterplans-101-series. This series is written by my former boss and current Director of Debate at the University of Wyoming Matt Liu. It covers a lot of the issues typically associated with counterplans, e.g., more advanced issues of competition and other theoretical issues related to the counterplan. I wouldn’t read this until I felt that I had a decent understanding of the logic of counterplans more generally; however, once you’re familiar with the basic idea, I’d read this series to start gaining more insight into the more advanced ideas associated with counterplans in debate. (However, I vehemently disagree with Liu’s take that agent counterplans are competitive because it’s not an opportunity cost for another agent to take a course of action.) 
• Digital Speech and Debate: https://www.digitalspeechanddebate.com/beginnercurriculum. This project seems wildly underutilized and contains some of the best resources out there for learning policy debate (I really think that the series “Elevating the AFF” by Anthony Trufanov is one of the best I’ve watched and I felt that I learned something out of it as a coach). 
• Dartmouth Debate Institute: https://youtu.be/ubm3bunm8lQ. The lecture, given by Anthony Trufanov, is a great introduction to counterplans. As I expressed above, I think that Trufanov is incredible and while this introduction of counterplans seems like it’s introductory level on face, don’t let that fool you—there are incredibly dense thoughts about counterplans woven throughout this lecture that leave you learning something the second or third time that you watch this. 
• The HSLD Facebook Resource Directory: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1w_Qrm3LUNrDDgOzc-h7i_3UDaV3OniNN29FMk5ZI-Ek/edit?fbclid=IwAR1vGQGS-jztRdDWFWoZ6Vkn4tbXE9LNP2-U3mC0UpbXJsh3yo7q7UG8Nx4#gid=0. While I can’t vouch for everything in here, this resource directory (part of the High School LD Facebook group) contains a lot of links to useful repositories of information that could help someone learn more about counterplans. 

Endnotes

[1] For an additional example, see this introduction to counterplans in the 2008 book The Policy Debate Manual by Joe Bellon and Abhi Smith Williams: 

The Negative’s Turn to Argue for Change

Sometimes the world is messed up, and there’s just no arguing about it. For the affirmative, this can be great news (well, in a totally weird kind of way). The point is that the affirmative has a great advantage when there are terrible, indisputable problems in the world that can be solved by the affirmative plan. Sometimes these problems consist of ongoing problems that are inherent in the current system (like racism, environmental destruction, poverty, disease, and so on). Other times these problems take the form of crises that are on their way but might still be prevented by timely action (global warming or imminent nuclear conflict, for example).

When the consensus of experts is that things are (or are about to be) really bad, the affirmative can have a competitive advantage that it is hard for the negative to overcome. After all, if we are sure that the current system is causing a lot of harms, then it may be a good idea to pass the affirmative plan even if it might not be completely effective — or even if it causes some disadvantages. If the harms caused by the status quo are bad enough, then the advantages of the plan can be nearly impossible for the negative to overcome.

A long time ago, some clever negative debaters thought to themselves, “hey, it isn’t fair that the affirmative is the only team that gets to propose a plan for change! And anyway, that’s not how the real world works. If someone proposes one idea for change, another person comes up with some different idea. We don’t just debate about whether or not to act; we debate about what action to take, too.” It is because of bitter, unhappy rants like this that great progress is made. Before long, it became common for negative debaters to propose their own plans for change. These negative plans are called “counterplans.” 

The Policy Debate Manual, p. 47

[2] I also think that the Smelko and Smelko definition is incorrect because it is not the case that counterplans must necessarily solve the significant problem(s) that the affirmative claims to exist. Take a debate between going to get lunch or finishing up some debate work. It is clear that the counterplan—to finish debate work—solves none of the harms that the affirmative will identify—hunger. However, it is clear that the “finish debate work” counterplan is a legitimate counterplan that the affirmative must refute. 

The Case for “Sample Ballots” for NSDA Nationals

Lawrence Zhou was the 2014 NSDA National Champion in Lincoln-Douglas Debate. He is now an assistant coach at Apple Valley High School and the Director of Publishing at the Victory Briefs Institute.

The Opinions Expressed In This Post Are Those of the Author And Not Necessarily Those Of Victory Briefs.

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I briefly argued in my recent Miscellaneous Musings post that one potential way to improve the quality of both judge training and student information at NSDA Nationals would be to have judges complete a sample ballot of a debate round that would be publicly viewable by students prior to and during the tournament.

Here, I intend to sketch out both what this model could look like and why I believe this would be a valuable tool to incorporate into the judging training process for NSDA Nationals (and other tournaments). Unlike my previous posts, I aim to keep this post quite short and readable because I truly believe that this model, while initially unintuitive, is ultimately uncontroversial once the arguments for and against are considered.

While my proposal stems largely from my criticisms of inexperienced judging that I have laid out in previous posts, I do not believe that one needs to accept any of the underlying criticisms of judging at NSDA Nationals to find value in this model. I believe that the benefits of incorporating a sample ballot into the LD Paradigm stand on their own regardless of where one lands on the value of different judging styles.

Finally, while I am writing in the context of Lincoln-Douglas debate, there is no reason such a model couldn’t be applied to any other debate event such as policy, public forum, or even Big Questions. Additionally, this could be a model adopted more widely for other tournaments as both a tool for judge training and for judge paradigms.

The Model and Its Benefits

My proposal of “sample ballots” could work in a variety of ways. I will propose one possible way this could be adopted, but this approach is largely flexible and adaptable. What matters is that the core idea of having a publicly viewable sample ballot remains.

The basic idea is that prior to the NSDA National Tournament, judges would watch a final round of Lincoln-Douglas debate (or any other debate event) and submit a sample ballot as if they were a judge. My proposed round is the 2018 final round between Ishan Bhatt and Jackson DeConcini on the topic, “Resolved: The United States’ use of targeted killing is unjust,” as I found the round to be an excellent example of many core Lincoln-Douglas skills and concepts. 

The key point is that students should also be able to view the same round as the judges so that they can see how their assessment of the round aligns or differs with the judge’s assessment of the round. 

Judges would roleplay as a judge, interacting with a Tabroom.com page identical to the one that they would get while judging. This would require having the judge click the “Start Round” button, selecting a winner, assigning speaker points, and filling out a ballot (and comment section) as if they were adjudicating a real round. 

My proposal would involve submitting a decision with a minimum word count (say 200 words) and offering three (3) comments to each debater using a ballot that resembles the actual ballots judges would submit at Nationals. Those ballots could then be attached to a publicly viewable page linked to a particular judge. For example, one button on the existing LD Paradigm Page could link to this publicly viewable ballot.

After the judge submits their ballot, they would then be able to view select ballots from other judges. These could either be the real ballots from actual judges on the final round panel or they could be ballots solicited from experienced coaches and judges from a variety of backgrounds. This would allow judges to compare their ballots to ones from more experienced judges.

I argue there are two buckets of benefits to such a model: benefits to judges and benefits to competitors.

Benefits to Judges

I believe that judges would benefit in two ways from this model.

First, it provides an opportunity to get familiar with the logistical details of submitting a ballot. By having the judge roleplay a judge, they would become more familiar with the process of judging on Tabroom.com. Judges would have to click “Start Round,” submit a winner and speaker points, and fill out the ballot just as they would have to when the tournament started. Based on my (limited) experience with running the NSDA Debate Judge Training (materials available here), many judges are still unfamiliar with how Tabroom.com works and this would provide an opportunity to translate theory into practice.

Second, it allows judges to receive feedback on their judging. Being able to compare their recently completed ballots to ballots from more experienced judges, new judges can see what some of the differences in both the substance and style of comments among various experienced judges might look like. This benefit is also quite scalable as various ballots submitted through the training process can be incorporated into a training bank over time to include a wider variety of perspectives. 

Benefits to Competitors

I believe that this would give competitors access to a much richer and meaningful paradigm. As I’ve previously argued in my 2021 version of my Miscellaneous Musings, judge paradigms often don’t provide meaningful information to competitors. This appears to be a widely held view amongst competitors and coaches from all walks of life. Right now, the paradigm simply doesn’t help debaters understand how to persuade their audiences. However, this proposal to adopt sample ballots would give a much more detailed and holistic view about how judges actually judge. Debaters can actually see the judging process and understand what the judge is looking for. 

Potential Objections

While I view my proposal as positively modest, there are potential objections to this proposal that I will attempt to address here.

First, and most obviously, is the additional time investment this would require for judges. While this would require an extra hour or so of additional time for a judge prior to attending NSDA Nationals, I view this as an acceptable time investment, especially given the extended time scale and importance of NSDA Nationals.

Second, this seems unnecessary for judges with lots of experience judging rounds. I could see there being a case for being able to opt-out of this requirement. For example, any judge who marks that they have judged over a certain number of rounds this season could be exempt from having to complete this. However, I would still think that it is beneficial for all judges, regardless of experience level, to submit this ballot because of the important information it provides to competitors and judges. 

Third, this seems like it might provide too much information for students, potentially undermining the value of judge adaptation. Without diving into the more fundamental debate of what the value of judge adaptation is, I view this response largely as a nonstarter. Not only does this ignore that students already have access to a bevy of information about the judge via the required LD Paradigm, any additional information that the judge may choose to submit to their Tabroom.com paradigm, and any direct or indirect experience with the judge from the past, but this also overlooks the myriad of benefits this affords to judges themselves.

Other objections are also unpersuasive to me. This would not be any more complex for judges to figure out and, if anything, reduces complexity during the tournament by giving judges a less stressful environment to practice judging. This would also be quite feasible from a technical standpoint, requiring nothing more than an extra page associated with a judge’s NSDA LD Paradigm.

Conclusion

I think this modest proposal would only impose a very mild cost on judges prior to the tournament while returning benefits to judges and competitors far beyond the initial time investment. If adopted, I believe this “Sample Ballot” proposal would greatly decrease the number of totally inexperienced judges in the pool and help students better understand the judging style and preferences of their audience.

8 Tips for In-Person NSDA Nationals by Lawrence Zhou

Lawrence Zhou is the 2014 NSDA National Champion in Lincoln-Douglas debate. He is a graduate assistant at the University of Wyoming, head coach of Team Wyoming, and an assistant coach at Apple Valley High School. He was formerly the Director of Lincoln-Douglas Debate at Victory Briefs.

The Opinions Expressed In This Post Are Those of the Author And Not Necessarily Those Of Victory Briefs. 

Lawrence lays out 8 tips for anyone attending NSDA Nationals in-person, including thoughts about the Covid-19 guidelines and how to adjust practice and presentation after years of online competition. 

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Woo! In-person NSDA Nationals is back, this time in Louisville, Kentucky! I haven’t been at NSDA Nationals in-person since 2018 when it was held in Fort Lauderdale (I sadly missed 2019 as I was studying abroad in China) and the online NSDA Nationals in 2020 and 2021 were alright, but clearly no substitute for the experience of physically being at the largest academic competition in the world. 

For some, this might be your first in-person tournament ever (and congrats to those of you who started debating during the pandemic and stuck with this activity!) and there might be a lot of confusion or a general lack of awareness about how in-person NSDA Nationals works. I have already seen several messages or posts in various online forums inquiring about NSDA Nationals. So, I decided to gather most of my thoughts about this tournament and put them in this one article in the hope that this helps some people thinking about competing at in-person NSDA Nationals. This article is mostly geared towards students in LD and PF, but there are sections in here that might also be helpful to new coaches. 

Before I get into my specific tips, the NSDA National Tournament website is available here: https://www.speechanddebate.org/national-tournament-2022/. I would spend time clicking around the various pages, including the Coaches and Students tab, as this website will be very important and might answer many of your questions you have about the tournament itself. I would say that most of the information that you need to know for the tournament can be found somewhere on the webpage, but it’s not the easiest to navigate if you’re not familiar with it, so spending some time just exploring it can be quite helpful and answer a lot of your questions. 

I also know that some states use alternative tabulation sites like Joy of Tournaments or Speechwire, but the National Tournament will be held on Tabroom.com here and so I would also recommend being familiar with Tabroom.com’s features, including the Paradigms feature, where you can look up the thoughts and beliefs about debate that a judge might have before the round begins. If you’re new to Tabroom.com, the NSDA has a webpage that has helpful articles on getting started with Tabroom.com. 

Finally, I would consider skimming part of the High School Unified Manual, particularly the section starting on page 109 titled “Tournament Procedures for Debate Events.” For those of you who have never attended, the way that NSDA Nationals works for debate events is a bit strange, so making sure you’re familiar with the way it operates is important. 

The short version is that the debate side of things can be broken into two distinctive sections: preliminary rounds and elimination rounds. In prelim rounds, each competitor will debate 6 prelim rounds with 2 judges in each prelim round, which leaves a total of 12 possible ballots to earn in prelims. Any competitor who receives at least 8 out of 12 ballots will advance to elims. The distribution of the ballots does not matter, so long as it totals up to 8. Once in elims, the tournament then operates as a double-elimination bracket (prelim ballot count becomes more or less irrelevant here), where any competitor who loses 2 rounds in elims will be eliminated from the tournament until there are just 2 debaters remaining. All elim rounds are paneled and power-matched. 

Without further ado, here are my 8 tips for returning to in-person competition at NSDA Nationals. 

1. Pay special attention to the Covid-19 guidelines. 

Even as mask use declines in the wake of a federal judge’s ruling striking down mask mandates (a judge who, I might add, was deemed “not qualified” by the American Bar Association) and airlines’ decisions to remove mask mandates, the World Health Organization still recommends wearing masks in public spaces because even one-way masking helps. To that end, I’m quite happy that the NSDA has recognized that Covid-19 is not over and is taking reasonable precautions to prevent Covid-19 outbreaks. 

The NSDA has released a comprehensive document concerning Covid-19 health and safety guidelines. At eight pages long, it’s not an easy read, but here are some of the main things to make sure you’re aware of: 

• All individuals attending NSDA Nationals are required to be fully vaccinated against Covid-19 and upload verification of vaccination through VaccineCheck. A full description of the verification process and what constitutes being “fully vaccinated” can be found in the document. 
• All individuals attending NSDA Nationals are required to wear a mask with some exceptions such as while actively consuming food or beverages and while performing. While the tournament does not mandate a particular type of mask, I strongly concur with the National Tournament’s recommendation of using high-quality KN95 or N95 masks (you can find a list of where to buy trusted masks here or here; I personally use Project N95). I have found that masks that utilize head ties or straps where the straps loop over the head instead of over the ears (such as this one) are far more comfortable to wear for extended periods of time. Also, there’s evidence that suggests that masks secured using ear loops are less effective than masks secured using head straps. 
• There will be on- and off-site Covid-19 testing sites. I would still personally recommend several members of your party bring along some rapid Covid-19 tests for your group. 
• There is a fairly comprehensive section outlining what to do if one or more of your party tests positive for Covid-19 during the National Tournament. I would make sure that everyone is aware of that process. 

While many competitors may choose to remove their masks while competing (see the official document linked above for guidance on this policy), some competitors may still choose to compete while wearing a mask. First, if you plan on not wearing a mask while competing, please be respectful to those who choose to keep their mask on while competing. Second, if you plan on wearing a mask while competing, please make sure to practice speaking with the mask on. This post by the American Speech-Language-hearing Association and this post from CNN have some great advice on how to ensure you are still properly communicating while wearing a mask. 

2. Pack in advance.

Many debaters and coaches haven’t traveled to an away tournament in years. When I was preparing for my first in-person travel tournament in nearly two years, I realized I had forgotten how to efficiently pack for debate trips. The worst is when you get to the tournament hotel and realize you forgot your phone charger or toothpaste. While this is not the end of the world (most teams will do a Walmart or Target run on the first night to grab snacks, drinks, and items that people forgot to pack), it is often a minor inconvenience that can be one additional point of stress in an already stressful trip. The best way to solve this is just to plan in advance. 

Here are some of my general packing tips: 

• I would strongly recommend creating a packing list to help organize your packing. 
• I would also strongly recommend packing at least one day before the trip so you have time to double-check your packing. 
• Keep in mind the weather in Louisville (you can find the average weather patterns for June here) and make sure you’re packing weather appropriate clothing. 
• Pack lightly for your personal item or backpack that you will bring with you to the competition venue. You will be walking a decent bit each day, and anyone who is walking with one of those massive backpacks is going to be so much more sweaty and tired compared to everyone else. 
• Victory Briefs also released an article a few years ago detailing what some camp staffers would carry in their debate backpacks if you’re looking for some inspiration (even if some of the item recommendations are a bit dated). 

Here is a list of the items that I would consider including in your packing checklist (this is not meant to be comprehensive): 

• Appropriate competition clothing, 3-5 days.
• Casual clothing, including comfortable clothing for travel, 5-7 days.
• Socks and underwear.
• Wallet and ID.
• Refillable water bottle.
• Laptop and charger.
• Cell phone and charger.
• Portable battery.
• Headphones or earbuds.
• An extension cable (these are lifesavers for buildings where outlets are limited, I personally use this one from Anker).
• Face masks and rapid Covid-19 tests.
• Debate specific items like flow paper, colored pens, and a timer.
• Relevant toiletries like toothpaste, toothbrush, deodorant, facial cleanser, lotion, etc. (keep in mind the 3-1-1 liquids rule if you’re flying).
• Any medications or supplements you need.

3. Coordinate travel.

This part is more geared towards coaches and adults who have to worry about the logistical side of debate tournaments, but before I get into those boring details, I have some advice about travel for students. 

This lecture from the 2020 Dartmouth Debate Institute by the 2020 Rex Copeland winner Miles Gray is one of the best lectures I’ve seen about what it takes to win a major national circuit tournament. While most of the advice is geared towards policy debate, there is so much insight and advice packed within this lecture that is broadly applicable no matter what type of debate event you do. In particular, I would really recommend listening to the section that starts around the 28 minute mark which is about the travel and rest day and gives great advice concerning how to approach the travel day in terms of sleep, food, and hygiene. There are other great nuggets of wisdom throughout the lecture, including tidbits on how to perform at the highest levels against specific teams, how to deal with mental health during a tournament, and how to effectively leverage the resources of a team, so I strongly recommend watching the whole thing even if you’re not a policy debater and just bracketing off a lot of the advice that is specific to the intense preparation process of policy debate. The short version is that you have to remember that traveling is tiring, even when you’re not doing anything (and this is especially true for those of you on the west coast). Regardless of whether you’re flying or driving, travel is draining. Don’t use this for doing lots of debate work. Instead, use it to relax and prepare both mentally and physically for the tournament. I’ll discuss this more in the 6th section of this article. 

Now for those who have to pay attention to the nitty-gritty details of traveling to the tournament, there are two similar but distinct travel schedules that need to be coordinated: travel to the tournament and travel during the tournament. 

I can’t speak much about traveling to the tournament. Hopefully, your coach, chaperone, or trusted adult will be dealing with travel logistics. If you’re in charge of coordinating travel to the tournament, I recommend looking at Debate Travel Tips, a travel blog written by Lexy Green, director of forensics at College Prep, that contains a lot of great travel tips useful to anyone but debate coaches especially. There are also tons of excellent resources on how to book cheap flights and hotels out there, though it’ll take some time to go through them all. 

My best advice I can offer for traveling to the tournament is that the best way to reduce costs is to share them. Find out which other schools from your area are attending and find a way to share a ride with them, split hotel rooms with them, or otherwise share costs. For example, when I went to NSDA Nationals while I was in high school in Oklahoma, many of the Oklahoma schools would coordinate travel (usually by caravan and school vehicle) to the tournament. Hopefully, travel to the tournament isn’t the responsibility of any student, but it’s still worth knowing a bit about travel logistics. 

Traveling during the tournament can also be quite difficult. Due to the sheer scale of the tournament (I believe the front page of the National Tournament page says there will be approximately 6,000 competitors at NSDA Nationals this year), the way the tournament works is that each main competition event has its own building (usually just a local school building), so that extemp might be in one school building on one side of town while policy debate might be in another building on the other side of town. For smaller teams with only one or two entries, this may not be such a large concern, but for teams that have multiple entries across multiple events, this can pose a large logistical challenge. 

I would first recommend looking at the Coaches tab on the NSDA website and looking at the section about Competition Venues. I would then look at the Google Doc called High School Tournament Event Schedules and Venues which will show a more detailed schedule of which competition events are located in which buildings. For example, LD will be held at Atherton High School (Google Maps link here), while PF will be held at Doss High School and Trunnell Elementary School (Google Maps link here). These schools are about 10 miles away from each other, and I imagine it could easily take over half an hour to travel between these schools during the busier hours of the day (when I looked up directions between these two schools as I writing this article, Google Maps said it would take 23 minutes with usual traffic). If your school or district has a team competing in PF and another in LD, having the same driver drop off teams at both venues seems inefficient. Finding a way to share resources and responsibilities with others helps a lot. 

For example, the Oklahoma schools that went would usually stay in the same hotel and schools would divide up travel responsibilities at the tournament, so that one school might take all the district’s LDers to the LD building while another school might take all the original oratory kids to the original oratory building. You can also try and coordinate with other small schools attending and find a way to share costs that way through forums like the High School LD Debate Facebook group or the r/debate subreddit and the various Discord servers associated with it (explore at your own risk, many of these sites are student run). 

4. Explore.

One of the best parts of traveling for debate is that you get to experience different cuisines and cultures. Personally, debate is the reason why I’ve been able to travel to many different places, from Alaska to D.C. and even abroad to China! 

While Louisville isn’t exactly the most exciting destination to travel to, it still has many fun things for people to see and experience. I might recommend taking a look at what Trip Advisor recommends to do in Louisville or seeing what the Louisville tourism website suggests, including what restaurants they feature. Personally, I’ll probably try and avoid some of the more popular attractions on the weekend since the city will be flooded with other speech and debate people, but I will be on the lookout for some good food in the city. I would strongly recommend trying to bake in some time in your schedule to do something fun as a team or district. Consider assigning someone to be in charge of planning your touristy excursions (and make sure they’re sensitive to financial or other constraints that members of the team might have). 

5. Adjust presentation practice.

When tournaments were primarily online, many of the aspects of public speaking were relegated to the sidelines. There was less of a focus on body language, facial expressions, vocal modulation, and composure compared to in-person events. But as Jo Spurgeon, the 2020 NSDA National Champion in Lincoln-Douglas debate, argues in a piece for Triumph Debate, “People like to claim a strict divide between speech and debate events. The issue with this, though, is that many of the skills you learn in speech… cater nicely to debate. People who are smoother speakers, modulate their voices, and can at least feign interest in what they are saying are subconsciously more memorable and more persuasive.” I very much agree with this advice! To that end, I’ll just add a few more thoughts here: 

• Practice speaking. Public speaking is not easy (it still remains one of the most common fears in the American public) and requires practice. This means practice sounding persuasive. Focus on inflection, pronunciation, articulation, and all the usual stuff. This video by Chris Anderson on how to give a great TED talk is an excellent watch for improving public speaking skills. There are so many resources out there for learning more effective public speaking, so I leave it to you to discover those on your own, but just make sure to actually practice! 
• Focus on how you present in a physical space. If you sway, fidget, or otherwise display body language that conveys that you’re nervous or not confident, that will damage your credibility. Body language heavily affects your public speaking and so it is worth spending some time focusing on this skill. Do drills! I would strongly recommend that you record yourself presenting and look for eye contact, composure, and other non-verbal elements of your presentation that can affect how the judge perceives you. 
• Use paper copies if possible. When I competed back in the dark ages of 2014, using computers in round was just becoming commonplace, and it wasn’t until after I graduated that it was more common than not to see competitors read cases and blocks from their computers instead of from paper. For a while, using paper debate cases was evidence that a debater was stuck in the ancient days of when there were only typewriters and the cell phone hadn’t yet been invented. Today, that trend is reversing, with more and more evidence piling up in favor of ditching our reliance on screens, including findings that taking notes by hand is superior to typing them out and that computers are often larger sources of distraction than productivity. I think there is a lot of merit to these views and I think it says something about how one should prepare for NSDA Nationals. In particular, I think that paper is the way to go for NSDA Nationals. Not only is there evidence that paper is still easier for reading compared to screens, but I believe that reading from paper confers significant presentational advantages. Having printed cases signals to the judge that you are well-prepared (as you took the time to format and print your cases prior to the start of the tournament), that you care about formality (as using printed notes often looks more professional than burying your head into a laptop), and that you take the activity seriously. I also think there’s something classy and nice about a debater who approaches the podium with just some papers in their hand, ready to debate, compared to debaters who have to awkwardly carry their laptop and flow up to speak. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have your computer with you or that you shouldn’t use your computer if the need arises (e.g., if someone makes an argument that you have blocks to on your computer but you haven’t printed off those blocks yet), but I do think you should try and have at least your constructive speeches on paper. 
• Attire matters. Not only do formal clothes give off the appearance that you take the competition seriously, but there is also evidence that wearing formal clothing actually confers cognitive advantages to the wearer, making them feel more powerful. I would spend a little time ensuring that what you’re wearing is professional and conveys the image you want the judge to see. And yes, obviously professional clothing is often expensive, but thrift stores typically carry formal clothing at severely discounted prices. 

One caveat is that there are racial and gender differences in many aspects of presentation that should be considered. For example, there are well-documented biases in standards of “professionalism” for racial minorities, vocal differences between men and women (where masculine voices are preferred, an effect well-documented in the political arena), and beauty bias (a part of the halo effect, where presentation of attractiveness is then correlated with positive judgements of a person). Each of these deserves its own article because they are serious enough that could affect the outcomes of debates and are something that debaters should at least be aware of. Of course, the NSDA has put out guidelines on Culturally Competent Judging, but simply having judges being aware of biases rarely is sufficient to override those biases as work on implicit bias has suggested. 

6. Stay healthy and sleep.

A few months ago, I penned a short piece on ways in which debate tournaments can take a massive toll on your health. I also released a file called “Sleep Good” (available here) on the important cognitive and health benefits that proper sleep promotes. The tl;dr is that debate tournaments, particularly long ones like NSDA Nationals, take a massive toll on physical health. 

Natalie Schaller, the 2017 NSDA National Champion in Lincoln-Douglas debate, suggested in an interview that “caring for your health is important. Don’t goof off – get as much sleep as you can, drink water, don’t go overboard on the coffee, and try to find some healthy meals. What’s more important is staying mentally strong throughout the tournament, because Nationals really is a mental game.” I strongly agree with each of those points, which I’ll briefly elaborate on in turn. 

Here are just a few practical suggestions: 

• Drink lots of water. Caffeine in limited quantities is safe (and I personally consume waaay too much caffeine daily), but there’s definitely a risk of drinking too much caffeine which can come with a whole host of negative side effects. Many students also consume lots of energy drinks like Red Bull and that can also induce side effects like dehydration, anxiety, and insomnia. While some caffeine is fine, that should not serve as an adequate substitute for quality sleep or water. Water is great and you should drink more of it. 
• Eat. My junior year, I basically didn’t eat for an entire day of competition because the nerves were simply too much. That was absurdly unhealthy. Don’t do that. Try to eat somewhat regularly and eat healthy. Fast food satisfies cravings but rarely is ever good for you, especially during a tournament. Try your best to eat healthy and regularly. 
• Sleep. Again, I’ll plug my “Sleep Good” file here if you remain unconvinced about the benefits of sleep, but NSDA Nationals is a marathon not a sprint. It lasts a whole week. If you don’t sleep, you won’t perform well, simple as that. You’ll simply perform worse as the tournament progresses if you don’t make an effort to sleep (and that performance decline correlates with when you need to be at your peak performance in elimination rounds against other top debaters). This doesn’t mean you can’t stay up and hang out with your friends, but it does mean you must have limits on what you do and that you should try and sleep well. If you must ruin your sleep schedule, at least wait until you’re finished competing. 
• Move around. You’ll probably be moving a decent bit throughout the tournament, but as I’ve noted in a previous article about the benefits of walking, you should try and take brisk walks every so often for both the health and cognitive benefits it affords in the short-term. Even though it’ll be a bit hot in Louisville in the summer, I would also recommend taking a walk outside every so often, mostly just to get an opportunity to take your mask off and breathe fresh air for a while. 

7. Be nice to your coach.

This is some advice that I wish I could’ve given my younger self. NSDA Nationals is a stressful time for all, but especially the coaches. Many coaches are also full-time teachers who are in the middle of a national education crisis where they aren’t just responsible for children’s education and well-being for also, oftentimes, essential childcare. Coupled with the fact that teachers are underpaid for all this work and having to deal with national culture wars infecting their classrooms, it’s no wonder that teachers struggle so much with stress and burnout. Many coaches teach debate with almost no real financial return, forced to give up valuable weekends that could be used for grading, relaxing, or spending time with family and friends to escort a bunch of rowdy high schoolers to a tournament in exchange for a pithy stipend. The reason that debate coaches stick around? Because they care about their students. 

As a student, it’s often hard to appreciate the impact a coach can make in your life in the moment (the Humans of New York posted a story on May 9th about the incredible story of a single debate coach who made a transformative difference in someone’s life), but especially at the last and largest tournament of the season, please go out of your way to both express gratitude for your coach and to make their job a little easier. Something as simple as offering to carry their bag or buying them a coffee during the trip can go a long way. 

Not everyone will have the opportunity to thank their coach on stage during the thank you speech that precedes a final debate round, but that shouldn’t stop you from thanking your coach anyways. Thank and appreciate them for all they’ve done even when no one is looking. Your attendance at NSDA Nationals is a privilege, not a right, and it’s only made possible by the selfless sacrifice of your debate coach. 

8. Have fun!

Bennett Eckert, the 2016 NSDA National Champion in Lincoln-Douglas debate, remarked in an interview a few years ago, “Winning is great, but it’s important to enjoy Nationals while you’re there. Don’t think of it as some stressful, intense last tournament (especially if you’re a senior). Think of it as a last hurrah to celebrate the end of your career or year.” I couldn't agree more. 

Nationals isn’t fun when it’s treated as a stress fest. My junior year, I spent the time off in-between rounds simply stressed out and worrying about how I would fare in the next round. By the time I was eliminated in the quarterfinals, I couldn’t have been more relieved. I finally started eating again, talking to people again, and enjoying debate again. I was thrilled to remove some of my dress clothes and simply observe the semifinals as a spectator. 

My senior year went far better. I was less stressed, partially due to the fact I had already placed well the year prior and partially due to the fact that I had prepared more efficiently for Nationals that year, and consequently, my experience at Nationals was far better. I actually hung out with the other Oklahoma debate people, met some new debate people along the way, and ate a decent bit of Kansas City barbeque. Not only did I have a more competitively successful tournament, but I also enjoyed it far more. 

I guarantee you that no one is really going to care how well you did at NSDA Nationals within a few years. Even winning the tournament isn’t that big of a deal (I can confidently say that the vast majority of people I meet in debate nowadays have zero clue of my high school debate record). What you will remember is the experience of Nationals and the connections made along the way. I have almost no recollection of debating in finals, but I do recall the good memories from each NSDA Nationals I attended. 

Please, go out of your way to talk to fellow competitors, to meet new people, and to enjoy the event itself. NSDA Nationals can be overwhelming. There are so many people from all across the country. Apart from a few elitists who can be justly shunned, most people there are nice, friendly, and want to connect with fellow forensics competitors too! 

Conclusion 

NSDA Nationals is a one-of-a-kind event in its sheer scope and size. It can be a bit intimidating when you first attend, but if you try your best and have fun, it’ll be an incredible experience that you can be proud of for years to come. Hopefully, these 8 tips helped you and good luck to those competing in Louisville this summer!

Disclosure in Numbers by Peter Zhang

Introduction

I fondly recall my first outround: it started 20 minutes after pairings were posted, and Millburn AW did not disclose. In response to their topical hauntological-feminist-counterfactuals K-aff, I read a disclosure shell and presented reasons why military conscription was a bad policy. Following the crushing defeat, I helped my opponent set up a wiki page.

It's hard to picture this scene playing out in 2021. Nowadays, my team's pre-round disclosure decisions mainly concern how to best deflect pesky requests for our new aff's plan text or standard text. Over my four years in debate, disclosing full-text has gone from unstrategic (because they'll have your cards!) to even more unstrategic (because they'll have your cards, and you'll still lose to o-source!). The change is the product of countless debates over proper disclosure, both in-round and out-of-round.

Much has already been written on the subject. Previous articles have argued that disclosure is more fair and improves clash. Others have responded that disclosure harms creativity, isn't more fair, and hurts small schools.[1] Some articles have advocated for full-text disclosure, open-source disclosure, and tournament-required disclosure. The merits of disclosure are even being discussed in Public Forum.

I believe these discussions are too theoretical. Among the articles I referenced, only Bob's 2014 survey tries to actually assess the state of disclosure in LD. Questions like "does tournament-required disclosure work?" or "do norms improve over time?" benefit tremendously from concrete measurements. So—you guessed it!—I gathered some data.

Before I dive in, I should mention my personal stances. I think disclosure is good. I think open-sourcing might be harmful (for research skills). I'm inclined to favor full-text. You might disagree with me, and this article won't argue with you. Here, I merely want to present the state of disclosure.

Dataset

I scraped the wikis (during off-hours) of every season starting 2014. Schools and teams with egregiously misformatted wiki pages (i.e. a handful of PF-ers) were omitted. I collected the round info, cite names, and round reports of each team's page.

I also collected Tabroom data on every LD bid tournament, with historical records reaching back as far as available. Tournaments that weren't hosted on Tabroom or which didn't have entries pages were excluded. For the 295 remaining tournaments, I scraped the Novice, JV, and Varsity entries of LD, PF, and Policy. I made some judgement calls in categorizing these, but generally, Novice was open to middle schoolers, Varsity had a TOC bid, and JV was in between the two.[2]

I matched teams and tournament by using team names and school names. The losses are moderate (think 10%-ish), but significant enough that you should treat the results with caution. The aff and neg pages were combined for the analysis—if they only open-sourced on the aff, that still counts.

The Norm Setters

Let's start with the state of disclosure theory. This season's debaters love it. About a third of Varsity LD entries had a cite that mentioned disclosure. One-third is huge compared to last season and the season before, when the proportion plateaued at around 20%. It must have to do with the online environment—e-debaters are, on average, more engaged, more tech savvy, and much less likely to just ask for the aff in person.

Of course, "disclose citations" isn't a revolutionary idea. The real changes were in the other disclosure interps: open source, new affs bad, full-text, and round reports. Full-text blew up in 2017 and has steadily declined since; it seems to have been replaced by open source, which is now fairly popular. Round reports is still a fringe interp (as it should be). New affs bad, on the other hand, has grown exponentially: one in every seven debaters demands the plan text!

Norms Have Been Set

Ok, so there's more disclosure theory—have the sacrifices of substance been worth it?

It appears so, and along every metric too. Two-thirds of debaters disclose and the proportion has been growing each year. As we may have expected from the earlier chart, there was a bump in this season of about 10%. Of those who post cites, the share who post round reports and open source has grown consistently since 2016 and now is at almost 90%.

This is remarkable! In 2015, less than 5% of debaters open-sourced. Now, well over half do. The turnaround presents strong evidence that disclosure norms are malleable.

Tournaments

Using Tabroom data, we can disaggregate these rates across tournaments. I looked at just the 2019-2020 season. There's a ton of variation. Bid-level seems to be the strongest determinant. Sparsely-attended finals bids have the lowest rates of disclosure (e.g. only 4 out of 63 competitors at Myers Park disclosed). Meanwhile, large tournaments in California and Texas tend to lead the pack. A couple east coast tournaments also have strong disclosure practices: Bronx, Yale, and Columbia, to name a few.

The leading tournament, Harvard-Westlake, is an interesting case study. One reason that they have the highest rates of disclosure is that their invite requires it. That wasn't always the case. Up until 2016, there was no mention of disclosure in the tournament invite. In 2017, the invite required debaters to post cites. In 2018, the standard was elevated to open source. You can see these changes year-by-year: a big jump in cites in 2017, followed by steady increases in open source in 2018 and 2019.

The requirement also applies to the novice division, and the increases here were enormous. The rate of open source nearly tripled from 2016 to 2017, although it has declined since. Cites follow a similar pattern. Make no mistake—these disclosure rates may be lower than those of varsity, but they are stellar compared to the rest of the circuit. You'll see that in a bit.

All of this suggests that tournament-required disclosure does, in fact, achieve substantial compliance.

But What About the Children?

They are learning! From 2015 to 2020, the proportion of novices and JV entries that posted cites increased by six-fold. The rates for round reports and open source increased by eleven-fold and nineteen-fold, respectively.

Of course, the absolute proportion is still very small. If you're in an average JV or novice division, there's about a one-sixth chance that your opponent discloses. Nonetheless, if younger debaters are taught to disclose well, that should drive future gains in disclosure practices.

Putting the "Public" in Public Forum

Public Forum is at a tipping point. As PF-ers import arguments from LD and Policy, disclosure has snuck on board. I'll showcase a few examples here. These wiki pages are from my former high school teammates and they're fairly representative of the frontier in PF. Their cites certainly aren't bad (shoutout Dheeraj and Lawrence!).

And when the cites are bad, they open source. I don't think posting rounds has caught on yet (it's certainly a hassle), but that's probably asking for too much, too soon.

The data bear out these trends. In the first two years of the PF wiki, less than 3% of entries had a wiki. That quickly changed in 2019. Now, Varsity PF debaters post cites more often than JV and Novice LD-ers, and the gap is growing quickly. They've also picked up open source. In LD, there was multi-year lag between posting cites and open sourcing; of PFers who disclose, over a third already open source.

If PF takes the route of LD, we can probably expect rapid growth in cites and open source over the next few years, with a small lag in round reports. That will be an interesting development to watch.

Thank You, Harvard-Westlake

To wrap up, I tallied the number of citations and open sourced documents contributed by each school from 2015 to 2021. They provide crucial sustenance to bottom-feeders like myself in high school. Topping it off with both the most cites and docs is Harvard-Westlake. The runner-ups are Strake, Harker, and Lexington. Just for fun, I included anyone with a "DebateDrills" cite under their own school; very impressively, they came in fifth. Thank you, prep fairies.

Limitations and Next Steps

The data I used were limited in several respects:

1. Tabroom data was often unavailable for older tournaments. It seems that larger tournaments were the earliest to adopt Tabroom, which may skew the results.
2. I only examined LD bid tournaments, which probably isn't representative of PF. It certainly would help if someone could collect Tabroom IDs for PF tournaments.
3. Some entries were lost in the matching process. If Tabroom said "Harvard-Westlake" and the wiki said "Harvard Westlake" (without the dash), then the entry and debater wouldn't be connected, which could lead to systematic errors. A softer comparison (that tolerates errors) might do better.

Some cool follow-ups questions that this dataset could help answer include:

1. Are successful debaters more likely to disclose? Do they also disclose more?
2. Conversely, are debaters who refuse to disclose more likely to win, controlling for other factors?
3. What positions are being read? How does that change by location and over time?
4. Do debaters "cluster" around types of arguments (e.g. phil, policy, K)? Are judges systemically biased in favor of certain clusters?

Stay tuned. Thanks to Alan George and Joanne Park for their helpful comments on this article.

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[1] Follow-up articles have responded that it is more fair, enhances creativity, and protects small schools .

[2] You can find my scraping tools and many more details about the scraping process on the repo. Leave a star! And get in touch if you are interesting in collaborating.

How to Cut a Card by Lawrence Zhou

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Victory Briefs.

Lawrence Zhou was the 2014 NSDA National Champion in LD. He is an assistant coach at the Harker School and the Co-Director of Lincoln-Douglas Debate and Director of Publishing at Victory Briefs.

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As we transition into the off-season and many tournaments around the country are being cancelled out of an abundance of caution due to fears of COVID-19, now is as good a time as any to start learning some new skills.

This article is going to cover how to cut a card in-depth. This is primarily aimed for more traditional circuits and younger debaters who may have reverse engineered how to cut a card, but never learned exactly how to do it. Of course, more experienced debaters can use this as a learning tool for their novices or to brush up their own card cutting skills.

What is a Card?

Back in the days before the Internet and using computers to debate in round, debaters would literally go to libraries and photocopy sections of books and articles onto little 5x7 notecards to use as evidence in round. That is where the name “card” is derived from.

Of course, today we don’t live in such ancient times and arenow heavily reliant on the Internet for the vast majority of our debateresearch. But the purpose of a card has fundamentally remained the same.

A card is a piece of evidence or quoted material fromauthoritative sources, such as newspapers, journals, and credible blogs.The thing that makes a card different from evidence you might use for writingan English paper is mostly in the way that it is formatted. Card cutting refersto the process of collecting and formatting that evidence for usein competitive debate tournaments.

Cards are formatted differently by different people. What I will present here in this post is my personal process for cutting cards and my personal way to format cards. However, there should always be a few features that remain consistent across all types of cards, at least according to the Evidence Rules provided by the National Speech and Debate Association. I would encourage debaters (even the more experienced ones) to review the complete Evidence Rules as stipulated by the NSDA of their Unified Manual starting on page 29.

To summarize the manual, debate evidence must contain written source citations that include, at a minimum, the author name, publication date, source, title of article, date accessed, URL, author qualifications, and page number(s). Failure to adhere to these evidence standards can result in a loss or even a report to the tabroom (see the NSDA Debate Evidence Guide for reference).

Why Cut Cards?

Evidence in debate is primarily used to establish credibility. High school debaters are simply not qualified or knowledgeable enough to make assessments and predictions of the real world, especially when it concerns empirical claims. Evidence, then, is used to reference an authoritative source who is qualified to speak to on a certain subject area. For example, when making assessments about the likely economic impact of enacting a certain government policy, we should prefer to listen to the predictions of an economist over the musings of a high school student.

The problem is that evidence is usually very long. The longest speech in a debate is 7 minutes long which means that reading an entire article or news source as evidence to support a claim would occupy the entire 7 minutes, leaving the debater with no time to make other arguments. We want to hear evidence in debates, but there are time constraints that prevent debaters from reading too much evidence.

That's where the process of card-cutting comes in: it allows debaters to read evidence that has been shortened for the purpose of being read in a competitive debate with time limits.

Why don’t you want to paraphrase?

Many younger debaters and debaters in traditional circuits have a tendency to paraphrase evidence, where they might attribute an argument to a source but they won't quote directly. Not only does this run into problems with NSDA evidence rules, but it lacks the authority that comes with direct quotations. It's impossible for opponents or judges to verify if a paraphrase is accurate in the context of a debate round. Quoting from the source directly enables opponents and judges to see if you're accurately summarizing the argument being made which lends credibility to the argument.

Why not use ellipses?

Short answer: That violates NSDA evidence rules and you can lose rounds for doing this.

Tools for Card Cutting

The following are some tools I recommend for card cutting. The first 2, in particular, are almost necessities for efficient card cutting.

Verbatim

https://paperlessdebate.com/verbatim/

If you’ve never heard of Verbatim, this will fundamentally change how you do debate research. Verbatim is a series of macros designed for Microsoft Word that makes debate research, file organization, and in-round debating significantly easier.

If you do not have Microsoft Word, I strongly recommend you get it. Most high schools have a plan that allows you to download it for free or reduced price. If that’s not an option, it’s worth convincing your parents to pay for it. It’s one of the few pieces of software I willingly pay money for because it’s value to a debater is nearly immeasurable. Believe me, I’ve used Open Office, Google Docs, and the Mac’s vastly inferior Pages before – none of them stack up against the sheer versatility that Microsoft Word offers.

For this post, we’re going to ignore a lot of the featuresof Verbatim, including its usefulness as an organization and in-round tool.We’re just going to focus on how Verbatim can help you cut a card. Everythingyou need to know about Verbatim will be explained below in the article.

If you’d like to learn more about Verbatim, simply Google “Verbatim Tutorial” and you’ll find many tutorials on Youtube that will walk you through all the basic functions of Verbatim. If you have a Windows machine, there’s even a built-in tutorial when you first launch Verbatim and which you access by clicking “Settings”, “Verbatim Help”, and then selecting “Tutorial”.

For debaters without Microsoft Word, it is still possible to cut cards, but the process will be noticeably more time intensive. You can still follow along with the tutorial below but it will not be quite as easy.

Verbatim Menu in Microsoft Word for Windows

As a sidenote, Verbatim is notoriously finicky with Macbooks, especially the newer versions of Microsoft Office. It’s most reliable with Word 2011 on Macbooks. (This is part of the reason why I sold my previous Macbook in favor of a Windows device.)

Cite Creator

Cite Creator is a Google Chrome Extension (available here) that produces academic citations for use in competitive debate. While other options for automatic citations exist (e.g. Citation Machine and Easybib), I've found that they are not as convenient to use for debate (although I do still use them when doing academic work for school).

After you install Cite Creator as an Extension, it will attempt to create citations for any web page you visit in a little black box in the corner of your browser.

The picture below shows the basic controls of how to use Cite Creator.

Cite Creator Extension

Here are the modifications I’ve made to my Cite Creator settings to make it work for me, which you can access by clicking the "Options" button.

Lawrence's Personal Cite Creator Settings

If anyone would like to use the citation style that I use instead of the standard cite format, feel free to copy the custom settings that I use. This will be the citation format for the example card we'll cover below.

%author%, %y% -- %quals%[%author%, "%title%," %publication%, %date%, %url%, accessed %accessed%]

Of course, you can create your own citation style using the codes in the plug-in and many people have different citation styles they personally like. As long as the citation has the minimum required components by the NSDA, the exact format doesn't matter too much.

A Nice Mouse

Not all computer mice are created equal. In my opinion, a good mouse is incredibly helpful for card cutting because the process of formatting evidence requires precision and because mice with programmable buttons help take advantage of the macros in Verbatim.

At the bottom of this post, I’ll provide a list of my favorite recommended mice.

The Process of Cutting a Card

We’re going to go step by step through the process of cutting a card. I’ll show you each step I take for getting a news article into a debate ready-to-read piece of evidence using Verbatim.

1. Find the paragraph(s) you want to cut.

In light of the COVID-19 scare, I wanted to find a piece of evidence that was relevant to our current predicament. We’re going to use the article “Virus expert: As much as 70 percent of world's population could get coronavirus” from the Hill. Here is a screenshot of the short article:

We’ll be using this article as our example for cutting acard.

2. Copy and paste that text into Verbatim.

Select the text from the article and paste it into your openVerbatim document. Make sure that you are using the F2 button to paste text, soit eliminates the wonky formatting that many websites use.

You must include at the least full paragraphs you arecutting from. You may not copy and paste sections of a paragraph, where itstarts in the middle of a paragraph, or the middle of a sentence. It is usuallybest to copy and paste more rather than less. For example, if you are copyingthe example article, it would not be okay to start at “It is the bestestimate that I’ve been able to make…” You must start at “That is a projection,so we will…”

When it comes to a piece of evidence this short, Ipersonally prefer to condense the evidence into a single block of text. To dothis, select all of the paragraphs and click F3 or the “Condense” button inVerbatim. It should now create a single block of text that is much easier toread.

Article Pasted into Verbatim

3. Add the citation.

Many younger debaters forget to add in the citation and I sometimes have a habit of forgetting. To ensure this doesn't happen, I always add in the citation before I go any further.

Remember, there is no 1 correct way to cite your sources, but you must cite them in compliance with the NSDA rules. The following is based on the citation created by Cite Creator using the format I created myself.

This citation is lifted almost directly from the Cite Creator Chrome Extension referenced above. To copy the citation from Cite Creator, simply click Ctrl+Alt+C on the web page where the evidence was accessed from and then paste it (using the F2 button) in the document right above the text of the evidence.

However, Cite Creator doesn’t always get it right (for example, on New York Times Op-Ed pieces, it almost always calls the title of the piece “Opinion”, instead of the actual Op-Ed article title). While most of the information in this citation was correct, sometimes you’ll have to manually add in or fix some of the citation information. Here, I had to manually add the author qualifications by searching the author’s name on the Internet and fix the spacing issue between “The” and “Hill” in the source of publication section. It is your responsibility to ensure the citation information is correct.

Notice in this example that the author’s last name and the year of publication are in bold and out in front of the rest of the citation. That is because in a speech, you must read (at least) the author’s last name and year it was published.

4. Underline the evidence.

Next, we're going to begin shortening the evidence. The process of shortening evidence occurs in 2 steps: underlining and highlighting. We're going to start with underlining.

When underlining evidence, you should be focused on getting rid of extraneous words, phrases, and sentences that don't meaningfully contribute to the central idea of the article or the argument you want the evidence to make.

To underline your card:

1. Read through the evidence.
2. Select any text that you think might be important.
3. Click the F9 (underline) button.
4. Continue until finished with the card.

There is no one correct way to underline evidence (and indeed, the underlining may change depending on what the intended purpose of the evidence is). The following is how I underlined the article:

Underlined Card

Notice in my example, I underlined more than half of the evidence. This is a personal preference. You can choose to underline more or less. I personally choose to underline more because on this first pass through, I'm mostly focused on getting ridding of the parts of the evidence that I don't think are that important. For example, I didn't underline any parts that include phrases like "he said," "he added," or "he emphasized" because those are all unnecessary words. I also eliminated a few sentences that don't overall add to the argument the evidence is trying to make. I will eventually make the evidence much shorter in the next step.

However you want to underline your evidence is up to you. Each person will do it differently because these are basically different interpretations of the same piece of evidence. As long as you're focused on selecting the important information, then you're on the right track.

Optional: Add “Emphasis” to the evidence.

The following step is completely optional, but you can add emphasis to your evidence. Most debaters add emphasis for rhetorical or aesthetic purposes. Emphasis aids in rhetoric because those are important phrases that you might want to verbally emphasize when you're reading evidence aloud in a speech. Some simply add in emphasis for aesthetic purposes because they enjoy the way that evidence with emphasis looks in their document (weird, I know).

To add emphasis to your card:

1. Read through the evidence again, this time only reading parts that you've underlined.
2. When you come across words or phrases that seem important, select it.
3. Add the "Emphasis" style by clicking the F10 button.
4. Continue until finished with the card.

Your card should now look something like this:

Underlined Card with Emphasis Added

Here, I added emphasis to words and phrases I thought had some important punch to them. For example, I personally liked the phrases "impact the 'entire globe'," "'not an existential threat'," and "'none of those brought civilization close to its knees'" because they helped convey the central point of this article using clear language. You might have picked different phrases or words to emphasize; that's totally fine. Just make sure you understand why you're picking those words or phrases.

Again, this step is totally optional but I do strongly recommend it because it forces you to read through your evidence one more time before you move on to the last step.

5. Add highlighting.

We're almost done! The next step is the most important: highlighting. With underlining, we were mostly just trying to get rid of the unimportant parts of the evidence. With highlighting, we're just trying to get the evidence into the shortest possible version while not compromising on the warrants because only the highlighted portion will be read in a debate round.

To highlight your card:

1. Select the Highlighter tool.
2. Select the text that you think is important for making your argument.
3. Continue until finished with the card.

Your card should now look something like this:

Highlighted Card

Remember, we only read the highlighted portion in a debate round. So, instead of reading "A Harvard University epidemiologist says that as much as 70 percent of the world’s population could get the coronavirus" we now say "A Harvard epidemiologist says 70 percent of the world could get coronavirus." Both sentences are (more or less) grammatically correct, but the second one is much shorter while still conveying the same information.

You'll also notice that I highlighted parts of words, e.g. "influenza" was highlighted as "flu." This is acceptable if, and only if, you are not changing the original argument made by the author.

It will take time to figure out what is important to highlight and what isn't, especially since that might change depending on the context. Work with your coach, teammates, or friends and ask them to review what you've highlighted. They may have tips or suggestions for improving the highlighting of your card.

6. Add a tagline.

Last step is the easiest. Now we just need a tagline. A tagline is an introduction to the evidence written by the debater.

At this point in time, I have read through this paragraph 3-4 times so I have a good understanding of the evidence. I know that it is saying 3 main things: the spread of coronavirus is likely inevitably going to impact the vast majority of the planet based on expert models, that this impact is reason for some serious concern, and that the pandemic will not rise to the level of an existential threat based on previous pandemic threats.

I personally don't think the second main idea is that relevant, so I'm going to focus on the first and third. I want a tagline that quickly summarizes those ideas in a way easily understandable by many judges. I personally prefer shorter taglines since you can always explain your evidence in subsequent speeches and longer taglines rarely help.

Here, I'm just going to summarize the evidence as "Coronavirus is inevitable but not existential." But any tagline that tries to convey something similar would also be acceptable. Again, there is no one right answer here; just pick one that you like and you can always change it later.

To add the tagline to your card:

1. Place your cursor above the citation.
2. Write the tagline.
3. Apply the "Tag" style to the sentence(s) you just wrote by clicking the F7 button.

Your card should now look something like this:

Finished Card

Optional: Shrink the text.

You can go the extra step and shrink all the words that are not underlined into a smaller font. Many debaters prefer to do this to shorten the amount of space a card takes in a document, to increase readability, or for aesthetic purposes. Whether or not you shrink the un-underlined text is a personal choice.

To shrink the text:

1. Select the paragraph you'd like to shrink.
2. Click the "Shrink" button in the Format menu.

The card should now look like this:

Finished Card with Shrunk Text

Congratulations, you’ve finished cutting a card!

However, I personally hate the way that the default formatting looks in Verbatim and I especially despise Calibri (eww), so this is how that same card would look using my personal formatting preferences:

If you’d like to emulate my formatting practices, these are the settings that I personally use:

My Personal Verbatim Settings

You can find these under “Verbatim Settings” and the “Format” tab. I would also recommend playing around with these until you find something that you or your team likes.

Recap

To recap, a card is composed of 3 parts: a tagline, citation, and body of evidence.

• Tagline: A tagline introduces the main idea of the card. Taglines can be short or long, as long as they accurately summarize or represent the evidence.
• Citation: The citation has 2 parts: the verbal and written citation. The verbal citation includes, at a minimum, the last name of the author and the year of publication, although debaters may choose to add additional information like qualifications if desired. This is what is read aloud in a competitive debate round and is read before the rest of the evidence. The written citation complies with the NSDA Evidence Guide and contains all other relevant publication information that must be easily accessible during a debate round.
• Body of Evidence: The body of evidence contains the original piece of evidence in its full form with modifications. A card usually contains underlining and highlighting designed to maximize efficiency. In a debate round, only the parts that are highlighted are read aloud. The rest of the text is kept so that it is easily accessible during a debate round.

Only the tagline, verbal citation, and highlighted parts of the evidence are read aloud in a debate round. The rest of the information simply needs to be written down in order to comply with NSDA rules.

In case this was difficult to follow on with, there is a Word document attached at the bottom of this post that you can download to see the stages of cutting a card. You can manipulate the document to see how card cutting works.

Miscellaneous Questions

1. Should there be “paragraph integrity”?

This is a somewhat controversial question. Paragraph integrity refers to maintaining the distinctions between the various paragraphs in an article. Using the article referenced above, you can see that there are 9 distinct paragraphs. However, in the card that we cut, we collapsed all the paragraphs into a single block of text for ease of reading. There is no hard and fast rule for questions of paragraph integrity. Many younger debaters tend not to maintain it, at least partially due to the fact that when you select the “Condense” option in Verbatim, it automatically collapses all the paragraphs into a single block of text. To change this, simply go to Verbatim Settings, select the “Format” tab, and select “Retain Paragraphs” under the “Condense” box. When this is selected, the selected text will keep the distinction between different paragraphs.

More advanced debaters tend to keep paragraph integrity,especially when they cut evidence from more advanced sources like law journals.There are a few reasons for this preference. Some prefer to keep it simply foraesthetic purposes, as large blocks of text tend to be difficult to read andlook unorganized. Some keep paragraph integrity because they tend to cut verylong cards (where a single piece of evidence might be selected from multiplepages) and the paragraph integrity is critical to keeping it readable. Othersmay keep paragraph integrity because they may want to modify the evidence byshortening it and maintaining paragraph integrity allows them to find a clearspot to end the evidence. Whatever the reason, this is mostly a personalpreference. Personally, I keep paragraph integrity on longer pieces of evidencewhere each paragraph is quite lengthy but prefer to collapse the evidence intoa single block of text for shorter pieces of evidence from news sources.

2. Can you use footnotes/endnotes?

You can; however, it is not common practice anymore. Debaters used to heavily employ footnotes or endnotes in their citations. Nowadays, it looks a little silly, makes it more difficult to reference relevant information about your sources in cross-examination or during a speech, and simply adds more unnecessary work. In general, it is best to simply stick with the style of card-cutting presented here (or something similar) with a tagline, citation, and evidence.

3. How do I improve at card cutting?

There is no substitute for practice. Card cutting involves taking advanced arguments and knowledge and distilling it down to a short and understandable form. This is a challenging prospect and there is no shortcut for improving. Read more and cut more cards. This is the way.

When you have free time, you should strive to cut cards as practice. Especially now, when there is a lot of free time, use it to practice building a file. Think about a generic subject that applies to a lot of different topics (e.g. debates between utilitarianism and deontological ethics or economics questions about the goodness and badness of the free market) and try and cut cards about those subjects. Strive to cut a few a day. The more you cut cards, the better at it you'll become. You'll soon learn what's important to include and what's not. You'll see clever ways to make your cards shorter without compromising on the depth of warrants in the evidence. This will all come in due time, but you have to commit to practicing.

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Mouse Recommendations

The computer mice I recommend are wireless (they are simply more convenient to store in a backpack while traveling) and have programmable buttons. The programmable buttons are what's important: they allow you to assign them to macro keys. For example, I have one button on my Logitech MX Anywhere 2S assigned to the F9 button in Word which allows me to underline and the second button assigned to the F10 button in Word which allows me to add emphasis. This way, when I'm cutting a card, I don't need to use the keyboard. I can simply select text, click the button on my mouse, and the text will be automatically underlined.

Mice that I have used and can personally recommend because of how comfortable they are and how effective they are for debate are:

• The Logitech MX Master 3: The recommended mouse by many Tech Youtubers, it’s pricey but an investment. It’s precise, comfortable, and has several buttons that can be used with Logitech Options software to help cut debate evidence. The previous models are cheaper although I personally did not like the feeling of the MX Master 2.
• The Logitech MX Anywhere 2S: This is my preferred travel mouse due to its compact size and great form factor. It can use the same Logitech Options software to reprogram its two side buttons for card cutting. It's so good that when I lost one, I immediately replaced it the following day because I can't travel without it.
• The Logitech G502: If you’re a gamer, you’ve surely heard about this mouse. I have the wired version, but when the wireless version goes on sale, this is a great deal and incredibly powerful for cutting cards.

I’ve also heard great things about the Razer Naga and various other gaming mice, although I’ve not been able to personally use them for extended periods of time, so I can't personally recommend them. Either way, do your research before you invest in such technology. The up-front cost is a lot, so you want the device to last you for years.

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Here is a Word doc attachment where you can see each step of cutting a card in order:

How-to-Cut-a-Card-HandoutDownload

PF Application for Victory Briefs Squads is now Open!

We’re excited to announce that Victory Briefs Squads has opened applications for our Public Forum Squad for the 2019–2020 debate season. Squads gives debaters an opportunity to work with top coaches and collaborate as a team with other students from all over the country. Squad membership provides weekly Squad practices, frequent private coaching sessions, access to a curated shared Dropbox, guest seminars with championship level instructors and former debaters, many practice round opportunities, and case feedback.We are proud of our first year of Squads and the strong feedback participants offered. We frequently solicit feedback from our students to ensure the best possible experience and on our final student evaluation 100% of respondents indicated that they were glad they chose Victory Briefs Squads over other private coaching resources. Here’s what a member had to say about Victory Briefs Squads:

“Working with the coaches was really great. They were beyond helpful in both increasing my technical skill... and expanding my content knowledge… Overall, squads has really helped my improve my skills throughout they year and there’s no way I would have had any of the success I’ve achieved without the help”—David Edwards, Charlotte Catholic High School

Our primary PF coaches this season will include Krithika Shamanna and Bradley Tidwell. Students will also have the opportunity to attend guest seminars led by Anthony Berryhill, Matt Salah, Ellie Singer, Nick Smith, Chris Theis, and more TBA!The application will be on a rolling admissions basis, but spots are extremely limited, so we encourage you to apply quickly for the best chance at admission. You can apply to join the PF Squad here, or learn more at the VB Squads website. There are still a small number spots available in our LD Squad and you can find more info here.If you have any questions about Victory Briefs Squads, please email squads@victorybriefs.com.

Victory Briefs Squads is now accepting applications!

We’re excited to announce that Victory Briefs Squads is now open for applications for the 2019–2020 debate season. Squads gives debaters an opportunity to work with top coaches and collaborate as a team with other students from all over the country. Squad membership provides weekly Squad practices, frequent private coaching sessions, access to a curated shared Dropbox, weekly open office hours, guest seminars with championship level instructors and former debaters, and case feedback.We are proud of our first year of Squads and the strong feedback participants offered. We frequently solicit feedback from our students to ensure the best possible experience and on our final student evaluation 100% of respondents indicated that they were glad they chose Victory Briefs Squads over other private coaching resources. Here’s what a member had to say about Victory Briefs Squads:

“Working with the coaches was really great. They were beyond helpful in both increasing my technical skill (ie speed/efficiency/etc) and expanding my content knowledge... Overall, squads has really helped my improve my skills throughout they year and there's no way I would have had any of the success I've achieved without the help”—David Edwards, Charlotte Catholic High School

Our primary coaches this season will include Jacob Nails, Christian Quiroz, and Pacy Yan. Students will also have the opportunity to attend guest seminars led by Brianna Aaron, Anthony Berryhill, Sai Karavadi, Devane Murphy, Jake Nebel, SunHee Simon, Chris Theis, Marshall Thompson, Darius White, and more.The application will be on a rolling admissions basis, but spots are extremely limited, so we encourage you to apply quickly for the best chance at admission. You can apply to join the LD Squad here, or learn more at the VB Squads website. Applications are currently available only for Lincoln–Douglas debate. If you’re interested in a Public Forum squad, please fill out this interest form.Thanks again for being a part of the Victory Briefs family. If you have any questions about Victory Briefs Squads, please email squads@victorybriefs.com.

The Case for Orally Disclosing Decisions by Lawrence Zhou

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Victory Briefs. Lawrence Zhou was the 2014 NSDA National Champion in LD. He now attends the University of Oklahoma where he is an assistant coach at the Harker School and the Director of Publishing at Victory Briefs.Edit: Thanks to Eva Lamberson for their thoughts and comments. 

Introduction

I imagine that the vast majority of the people who initially read this article are those that will likely already agree with the conclusion that I am about to defend. However, I still believe there is value in writing an article defending a ubiquitous practice in national circuit debate. First, I want people who already agree with the practice of orally disclosing decisions to have something to refer back to when defending this practice to those that may not necessarily agree. Second, I want to directly speak to those who oppose this practice and attempt to have a meaningful dialogue with coaches and tournament directors at local tournaments who prohibit oral disclosure. To that end, this article will primarily be addressed to a skeptical reader. I genuinely want to lay out a case for something I see as a good pedagogical practice and attempt to seriously engage with the criticisms that those who oppose this might levy at it. I hope that, in the spirit of open-mindedness that debate fosters, those who disagree with me will also seriously consider my points and be willing to discuss this in a reasoned manner.The last time I made a post about a traditional tournament, it received substantial criticism in comment threads which were primarily directed at my “privilege” and “national circuit bias”. These are not without merit. It is very difficult to separate my position as someone involved in national circuit debate with my opinions about how traditional debate could potentially be improved. I want to first lay out a little bit of background to help explain where I’m coming from. I debated for a small high school in Oklahoma called Bartlesville High School. I didn’t travel competitively as a debater with the notable exception of the NSDA National Tournament, I didn’t have private coaches, didn’t qualify to the TOC, didn’t come from a place of “debate privilege”, debated in a state that primarily uses paper ballots, etc. I still have a lot of respect for traditional debate, with the NSDA National Tournament being the only tournament I have not missed in the last 8 years. The thoughts I am about to present are ones that are somewhat clouded by my current position as a coach for a larger school and being employed by a debate camp. But they are also thoughts that I think have merit and shouldn’t be immediately dismissed just because of who I am and where I come from, especially since the origin of my beliefs here came from my time in high school.This article will aim to defend post-round oral disclosure, primarily in the context of Lincoln-Douglas debate but these arguments also apply to Public Forum as well. I will begin by clarifying what post-round oral disclosure is, laying out a case for why I believe tournaments should adopt this practice, attempt to substantively engage common objections to this practice, and conclude with a brief call to action on the part of the readers.

What is post-round oral disclosure?

Post-round oral disclosure is when judges will tell the debaters immediately following the conclusion of a debate round at least who won the debate and a brief rationale for their decision. Judges may also, at their own discretion, also provide a few constructive comments to each debater, and, if time permits, answer one or two questions from each debater about how each debater could improve in the future. Post-round oral disclosure, henceforth referred to as PROD, is currently not the norm in many debate circuits around the nation. The current model is one where debaters do not find out until some later time who won the round and do not receive constructive feedback from the judge until after the tournament, typically in the form of a hand-written ballot. I call this post-tournament disclosure. I hope that local tournaments around the country will begin to institute PROD in all varsity and open divisions of Lincoln-Douglas debate. To clarify, I do not think that there should be PROD in junior varsity or novice divisions, and I will address why I believe this to be the case below. I also think there should be a mandatory time limit on the length of oral decisions to be no longer than 5-10 minutes. There are many valid criticisms of this practice but I will first outline my reasoning in defense of PROD and then attempt to address this.

The Case for Post Round Oral Disclosure

I believe there at least three strong pedagogical reasons to support PROD. I will point out what I perceive to be shortcomings in the current model of post-tournament disclosure and explain how I think PROD will help overcome these shortcomings. I will also attempt to alleviate some concerns skeptics might have with each of these particular points within the argument itself.

Immediate Feedback

The current model of post-tournament disclosure only reveals information about how to improve after the tournament has concluded. I believe this is detrimental to the education and growth of debaters for at least two reasons. First, it denies debaters the opportunity to improve during the course of the tournament. Say debaters are making an argument that many judges do not find persuasive (which happens quite frequently). It seems odd to me to think that it is educational experience to allow debaters to not learn from their mistakes over the course of the tournament and not be given the opportunity to improve or correct their mistakes. Second, the details of any particular round will become fuzzy after the tournament ends and the various rounds blur together. Trying to piece any given piece of advice from a judge with a particular in-round practice is quite the puzzle and leads to advice being substantially less effective at helping debaters improve. PROD helps correct this. They now hear feedback immediately following the round. This allows them to understand mistakes they have made early on and gives the opportunity to implement changes to their debating to allow them to improve as the tournament continues. Each and every round is a valuable opportunity to learn something and some of the best learning comes from debating at a tournament. Using each round as an opportunity to improve substantially improves the educational benefit of a tournament. Debating each preliminary round while making the exact same mistake costs debaters that many rounds to improve. This also allows debaters to more clearly understand feedback because the round will have just occurred and the details will still be fresh in their mind. Waiting until after a tournament makes feedback more unclear. This is especially important for tournaments at the end of the season, end of the topic, or important tournaments like one’s state or regional tournament since the feedback given at the end of a tournament becomes much less useful.A skeptic may think I am conflating the role of a debate round. A debate round merely assesses who did the better debating and we shouldn’t think of judges as being primarily interested in educating the debaters. I think this view cannot be squared with the reason why debate is valuable. Debate rounds are useful because they help improve kids. No one can really believe in the value of debate and think that debate rounds at tournaments are not one of the most important parts of the educational experience. Each round is an opportunity for improvement and growth. If we didn’t think that, then why have ballots with sections for judge comments? I think that debate rounds are incredibly important for helping students learn and PROD helps encourage that.

Direct Interaction

The current model of of post-tournament disclosure makes it difficult to determine what the judge means when they write on the ballot. There are many reasons for this: sometimes the handwriting is impossible to read, sometimes tournaments photocopy paper ballots that make them unreadable, time-pressured judges might make a mistake when writing down their comments, or sometimes judges write incomplete or difficult to understand thoughts. None of these are necessarily the fault of the judge, but they do ultimately impair the ability of debaters to learn from their debate rounds. I know that as a debater I was frustrated with paper ballots that contained very little actionable advice because of one of the reasons presented above. This strongly hindered my ability to learn from my debate rounds, see what I needed to improve on, and see what I was doing well that I needed to continue doing. The current model of handwritten ballots results in ballots that aren’t listened to or even seriously considered because of gaps in communication that result when judges cannot accurately translate their thoughts into short handwritten snippets on a ballot. PROD helps address this shortcoming by fostering direct interaction between the debaters and the judge. Judges are now able to quickly explain their decision and then provide actionable feedback in a way that overcomes the confusion of handwritten ballots. This direct interaction, particularly the ability of debaters to ask questions after the round, would clarify confusions and ambiguous thoughts. It would make sure that advice isn’t lost in translation and that confusing parts can be explained. Some of the best advice I ever received in Oklahoma would come from finding the judge after the round and asking them some thoughts about how they thought about a particular argument or how they thought I could improve. I think having a system where this is the norm and not reliant on being friends with a judge is one that would help make post-round feedback more clear and helpful.

Better Judging

Currently, there are too many judges that don’t pay attention in rounds and simply write statements like “aff wins a contention”, “neg was more persuasive”, or “good debate, I vote aff” on their ballots. This, in my mind, is not particularly beneficial or educational for debaters. PROD helps increase judging quality because judges have to immediately disclose their decisions instead of hiding the lack of a complete reason for decision on the ballot. This incentivizes judges to pay attention during rounds and make justifiable decisions to the debaters. This is especially true because debaters now have the opportunity to ask a question or two after the decision is announced which forces judges to consider the implications of their decisions. This also will, in turn, improve the quality of debating. Immediate feedback may also protect the activity’s and judge’s legitimacy, as without an immediate and justifiable reason for decision, debaters can blame a loss on a judge’s personal biases or judge’s lack of knowledge about debate instead of the debater’s failure to persuade the judge.This is perhaps one of the more contentious reasons in support of PROD and I can see many people seeing this as a strong downside to this practice. There are at least two major concerns with this point.First, what about parent judges? After all, it seems at least a little strange to require parents who don’t have a particularly strong grasp of this activity to render oral decisions to debaters. This is a valid concern, but one I think isn’t unique to PROD. If we don’t trust parents to render oral decisions, then why should we trust them to write down comments on paper ballots? Why should we allow them to judge at all? I believe there is a strong value in having parents judge rounds. They make sure debaters stay grounded in the real world and work on their persuasion skills. If we trust parents to make decisions at all, we should trust them to give some oral feedback. I would also wager that most parents are worse at writing down feedback as opposed to giving them aloud. I know that my parents would have difficulty writing down an evaluation of any of the presidential debates, but I know that immediately following the debates, they had verbal comments for both candidates. Parents, or non-debate affiliated judges, actually have a lot of experience in giving their opinions about debates orally but less writing them down. It seems much more consistent with the real world to have parents give their immediate feedback in a way that feels natural to them as opposed to making them write down complicated thoughts on a paper ballot.Second, doesn’t this deter judges from giving feedback if they feel like they don’t know what is going on? Perhaps, but once again, not unique to PROD. Judges will sometimes feel weird judging debates they don’t feel like they can follow. I don’t think is a strong reason to reject the practice. If they feel comfortable writing very little on the ballot, they should feel comfortable saying very little aloud. There's only a chance that at least this practice will encourage judges to think about their decisions more.

Objections

Of course, one may believe the reasons I have set forth in defense of PROD but still oppose the practice for a variety of reasons. I hope to alleviate those concerns.

Objection One: Disclosure takes too much time, delaying the tournament.

This argument has merit, and is probably the strongest objection PROD faces, but an increased turnover time between rounds is, at best, a speculative consequence. The inherent end that debate strives for is to impart a unique form of education, where students are taught to advocate for contrasting positions. While logistics are an obvious side-constraint on any tournament practice, it seems like rejecting PROD (or at least not doing a ‘trial run’ of post-round disclosure at a tournament this year in order to attempt to verify these concerns) for reasons that have not been empirically verified is unjustified when it does not run the risk of undermining the purpose of debate. Maximizing the quality of the educational experience, even if it creates a (small) logistical hurdle for tournaments, should drive tournament officials to make other parts of the tournament more efficient, in order to avoid compromising on the quality of education that the activity provides..Upon further investigation, the ‘time delay’ objection does not hold up to much scrutiny. Proponents of the ‘time delay’ objection cite CX/policy debate as an empirical example of increased turnover time between rounds. While I can’t speak to all tournaments across the country, I can attempt to draw on some examples from the local Oklahoma district I live in. At West Oklahoma debate tournaments, it was actually Public Forum debate that tended to lag behind the rest of the other debate events and cause tournament delays, a debate event without PROD. West Oklahoma also does policy debate at local tournaments. These rounds are magnitudes of order more complex than the average Lincoln-Douglas debate round for a litany of reasons: double the speech time, double the participants, and complex (and perhaps absurd) arguments that require more time to unpack. It also has norms such as flashing documents and PROD that add turnover time. Yet, these rounds also do not substantially turnover time. One could also look to larger invitational tournaments around in the country in Lincoln-Douglas debate. These tournaments all have PROD and these tournaments don’t seem to suffer from extreme turnover time.Finally, PROD trades off with time spent writing up a ballot. In Oklahoma, it seems like a common occurrence that one judge in the pool will delay every round by writing out a detailed ballot. Delivering an RFD orally takes much less time than transcribing complex thoughts onto paper in a legible fashion. In fact, it seems like PROD could potentially speed up time. Judges frequently turn in long, detailed written ballots that delay tournaments because they want to impart a lot of advice to debaters. With PROD, judges can give more advice in less time which could actually speed up tournaments.

Objection Two: Debaters don’t listen to RFDs after being told who won and who lost.

This is also a reasonable concern and one that my former high school debate coach thought was a very serious objection to this practice. It’s not without merit. Anyone who has worked with high school debaters know they have a listening and an ego problem. Why give feedback to them orally if they’re just not going to listen after the decision is announced?Well I believe there are two reasons that this objection is not as serious as it might first appear.First, this is not a phenomenon unique to PROD or even exacerbated by this practice. In the current model, debaters are just going to see ballots after the tournament and just look at if they won or not. If they won, they might not read the ballot because they think they already did so well. If they lost, they might be too angry to read the advice. There is just nothing in the current model that that requires debaters to learn from ballots or even anything that incentivizes them to pay attention the ballot at all. However, PROD forces debaters to sit there and listen. They can’t escape the comments. They may tune out, but they are forced to listen to the judge to some degree so it seems like PROD still increases education. Maybe paper ballots do encourage debaters to listen more because coaches can require debaters to talk about their ballots. But coaches can also require debaters to submit the notes they take over a RFD.Second, this seems almost entirely a problem with debaters, not PROD. If debaters choose not to listen to advice, then they will miss out on the benefits of PROD. Nothing about PROD encourages debaters to tune out, but I imagine most debaters will at least listen to the decisions because they can’t leave and are interested in how to improve so they can win more rounds.

Objection Three: Judges don’t write on ballots if we utilize PROD which means coaches can’t receive proper feedback.

Also a serious concern. Debaters are notorious for filtering all comments through their own biases and so when their coach asks about the judge’s comments, the debater is likely not to accurately describe to the coach what the judge’s comments actually were. This is important and requires careful attention to make sure this problem is adequately addressed.First, I want to point out that this isn’t unique to PROD. Because written ballots are already terrible, parents frequently leave ballots empty, and some tournaments are bad about returning ballots, it is already going to be the case that coaches will not receive much useful information from paper ballots. I can say that when I was doing a little work for local schools, paper ballots provided very little useful information to me as a coach. I wasn’t in the round, I don’t know the judge, and I can very rarely decipher the actual meaning of the ballot anyways. The current model isn’t very useful to coaches as it stands. However, at least some explanation of a decision is required in PROD and debaters will be able to write down some notes about the decision and tell them to their coach, so I believe it probably still is net better for education in this model.Second, there is no reason why there is a strong trade-off because judges can obviously write ballots and give oral feedback. In fact, many judges around the country give both oral and written feedback. Granted, the written feedback will be shorter and less developed. But think of the ballot as a set of bullet points which are then elaborated upon by the oral comments given. This still allows coaches to see the general idea of the comments without the confusion.Third, debaters should obviously be taking notes during the decision either on paper or on their laptop which they can send to their coaches. We expect varsity debaters to help novices, organize preparation, be responsible at tournaments, etc. I think it is reasonable to expect them to also take notices about the round in a responsible manner.

Objection Four: Debaters will argue with the judge.

The threat of debaters arguing with judges is an important one to address, because it has an obvious remedy. When new dimensions are added to debate rounds (such as PROD), new etiquette must be established. There is no reason why ‘do not argue with the judge’ should not be one of the ‘rules of debate’ that coaches teach in their novice debate classes. We were taught to shake our opponent’s hand, thank the judge at the end of the round (but not shake their hand!), and to maintain a polite attitude towards our opponents. I think it reasonable to expect debaters to not argue with the judge. Besides, any self-respecting judge, particularly an adult, will quickly shut down this behavior or just leave the room. The mere possibility of bad conduct on the part of students shouldn’t be a reason to exclude a practice. We expect students to cite their evidence in an academically honest manner even when we don’t check on them, I think we can also expect debaters to know how to be respectful. If they aren’t respectful, then their coaches can reprimand them. The potential for abuse shouldn’t shut down a valuable tool for many other debaters.Proponents of the ‘arguing students’ objection will claim that judges may be deterred to vote for rude debaters in the future, making the debate round unfair. This argument shows that there is a clear incentive for debaters not to argue with judges, and for coaches to teach debaters not to argue with judges. If debaters are punished for arguing with judges, good competitors will not argue with judges, and the issue will resolve itself. Additionally, debaters will argue with judges anyways. They might find them at later tournaments and ask them about decisions in a hostile manner, so PROD doesn’t seem to increase the likelihood of arguing with judges to any significant degree.

Objection Five: PROD is not good for novices.

As I mentioned above, I agree with this. Oral disclosure should not exist in novice divisions. Novices should not be expected to take notes during a decision or understand what is being said. This is not a reason to prohibit PROD in varsity/open divisions. For states that lack distinct varsity and novice pools, I imagine this might pose a potential problem to its implementation, but if the norm is already to expect novices to debate those with many more years of debate experience, I imagine that implementing PROD in those combined divisions would still be a good idea.

Objection Six: Knowing one’s (losing) record discourages debaters from trying their best.

Thanks to Eva for explicitly acknowledging this objection. I have heard this objection before from at least one or two coaches. I doubt this is, by itself, a knockdown objection to the practice, but certainly another reason to have some skepticism about it. I think there are at least two responses that can be made to this.First, it seems that debaters knowing their record is actually somewhat non-unique. The current model privileges debaters who know their judges, have more judges in the pool, more social connections, etc. because they get feedback from the judges but others don’t, including round results. Debaters with coaches in the tab room tend to have more access to information than others, for example, they will often know their preliminary round records before other debaters or have judges that they know give them additional feedback after the round that other debaters don’t receive. This is a very common practice at local tournaments, and seems unfair. While my high school worked in the tabroom and refused, out of principle, to tell us preliminary round records before they were released, there would always be at least a few debaters in the pool that did know their records thanks to connections they had. The PROD model would allow all debaters to receive access to their round records and in-depth commentary and round feedback in an equal manner that the current model does not allow. So I actually believe there is a problem with information asymmetry now and that PROD can correct that. I imagine this is particularly important for schools that lack such strong connections to information sources at tournaments.Second, I just don’t think PROD will exacerbate this problem anymore than the current system. Let’s say my above point is incorrect and that no student has any access to information beyond what the tournament tells them. I still think this problem of students being disincentivized in later rounds exists now regardless of whether or not we acknowledge it. Any semi-competent debater usually has some decent idea of how well they’re doing at a tournament, especially at the margins, which is where this objection is directed. It’s usually not that difficult to guess if you’re 0-3 going into the last round. If that’s the case, these students are already going to get discouraged and not debate their best. I also just don’t see any significant number of debaters who just give up at tournaments where PROD is the norm. Debaters going into their last rounds with losing records are usually still incentivized to win, to not lose that badly, or to have a fun or educational experience in round. While some debaters in the PROD model do not try their hardest when they know they’re losing, my guess is that those are the same debaters who wouldn’t try their best in a world of not disclosing decisions. Finally, even if we believed this objection to be totally true and found it a good reason to not disclose decisions, I still think the practice of at least giving oral feedback and comments would still be beneficial.

Call to Action

I think that PROD is definitely a good norm. It fosters increased accountability of judges and improves the educational experience of debaters. I think that tournaments across the country should adopt this norm and I think there are a few ways to make this more likely to happen.First, individual judges should orally disclose in rounds. This benefits the individual students in the round and sets a precedent for PROD. The more judges that utilize PROD encourages others to adopt PROD as well. Some tournaments may forbid this. I have personally deviated from this rule many times because I believe it is valuable. Even if I don’t disclose who won, I will give comments. I also make sure to keep comments to a reasonable length in time and also write comments on the ballots. Make sure that you are being respectful while promoting this norm. You don’t want people to hate you for doing what you think is right.Second, individual debaters should begin asking, very politely, for judges to orally disclose after rounds. It will encourage judges to think more about PROD and hopefully would make the transition to PROD smoother. It’s important to not force PROD upon anyone, because that would be disrespectful and cause backlash, hampering the long-term adoption of PROD. But there is nothing wrong with asking “do you have feedback for us on how we could improve?” A judge can, of course, say no, and the debater should respect their wishes, but asking can’t hurt.Finally, you can petition coaches and tournament administrators to move towards encouraging oral disclosure in round. The more pressure that exists, the more likely this will be adopted.People didn’t start using Tabroom as a tournament tool until very recently, but slowly, it is becoming a more popular site to host tournaments, mostly because a few schools started using it and began encouraging others to do so as well. PROD is, in my mind, just like Tabroom: a good thing for debate that faces resistance from the more traditional enclaves of debate. I certainly understand the concerns for adopting PROD, but I think that the adoption of PROD would be a net good for debate.

Preparing for the Season: An Interview with Sekou Cisse

Check out our interview with VBI staffer Sekou Cisse.Sekou debated for Success Academy HS in NY and had 9 career TOC bids, winning the Byram Hills Invitational + RR, the Beltway fall classic, the Newark RR, the Berkeley RR, NYC Policy RR, Kandi King RR, the Harrison RR, and Harvard. Sekou currently attends and debates for Wake Forest University. He was an instructor at VBI 2018.In this interview, we discuss how to approach preparing for tournaments, the key to success, and how he won Harvard, among other subjects.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpVWYA12hSI

Announcing the Victory Briefs Book Club!

Victory Briefs is excited to announce the Victory Briefs Book Club! Every 2nd week of the month, we will post a link to one book, one article, and one podcast episode that we think debaters should read or listen to on Briefly, Facebook, and the r/Debate subreddit. The content will be hand-selected by Victory Briefs staff with reasons for our recommendations. Discussions about the content will occur on the r/Debate subreddit posts that we create and some of the Victory Briefs staff will join into the conversation about the works. The first list of works will be released in two weeks!

What is the point of this?

Debaters can always read more and they can always read more together. We think that our recommendations will greatly benefit debaters and that conversations with your friends or teammates will enhance your understanding of these works. We hope that our recommendations will all be helpful and informative and that we might even help you find an author or podcast that you really like!

Is this for LD or PF?

It's for both! We'll try to pick works that are relevant to all debaters. Even the philosophy works that we recommend will be things that we think every person, not just philosophy majors and LDers, should be aware of.

Are these all debate applicable?

One of our motivations for creating the book club is not just to make debaters more informed debaters, but to make them more informed people. To that end, many of the works will simply be things that we think all debaters should be aware of, such as issues in society, general knowledge, and how to better yourself as a person. And some of these will just be silly works that we think are entertaining for debaters to read. Of course, many of the works will be debate applicable and we wouldn't be surprised if you carded a few of these works.

How do I contribute to the discussion?

You can, of course, read these on your own. However, we think a lot of the value of a book club is that you can discuss this with other people. You can find a friend or a teammate and discuss the works with them. You can suggest to your debate captain or coach that you follow along with the Victory Briefs Book Club and have your entire team read along. And you can also comment on our r/Debate posts along with others to pose questions and discuss the works that we've selected.

How do I recommend a work for the club?

If you have an excellent book, article, or podcast episode that you'd like us to consider recommending to others, email lawrence@victorybriefs.com with your suggestion and a short paragraph as to why we should publish your selection. You might just be featured in a future Book Club recommendation!

LD Card of the Day is Back!

The LD Victory Briefs Card of the Day Subscription is back!Imagine that you could receive high-quality evidence cut by experienced coaches in your inbox every day for free. Wouldn’t that be great?We think so too. That is why we are back with the LD Victory Briefs Card of the Day Subscription.Sign up using the form below and you will automatically receive a high-quality piece of evidence in your inbox every single day. And it's free. Cards will start being sent on September 1st. If you're already subscribed, perfect! The evidence will just start rolling in!

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