Monthly Archives: May 2009

Learning From Your Elders: How To Find and Use Published Scholarship To Improve Your Theory Debating

Policy debate is a specialized activity with a unique vocabulary and a rich history. Its evolution has been shaped in large part by the broader developments in argumentation and rhetoric that have taken place in the academic field of communication. For many years, this connection between contest round debating and the academy from whence it spawned was made explicit by the frequent publication of scholarly articles about debate theory and praxis. Communication scholars, many of whom served as directors of the nation’s leading debate programs, contributed to the development of the activity by authoring texts about the major issues faced by competitors, coaches, and judges.

While the heyday of academic scholarship about competitive debate has passed, its voluminous legacy remains a vibrant source of inspiration and knowledge for contemporary students. Tapping into this rich history of debate scholarship is a fruitful way for students to deepen their comprehension of key theoretical issues while improving their overall ability to debate them effectively in contest rounds.

This article provides advice for students wishing to leverage debate theory research toward improvements in their debating. First, it provides an overview of the sources accessible to most debaters. Second, it provides a list of suggestions for making use of these articles. It is my hope that this article will give interested students the basic guidance they need to dive head first into the world of academic debate scholarship.

Continue reading →

Revisiting the Toulmin Model in debate

In novice debate and any introduction to argumentation course students are taught the Toulmin model. In short the Toulmin model states that “Arguments must follow logically and therefore contain a claim and warrant”. Novice debaters are taught this with an emphasis because they prolific for their ability to advance claims but struggle to explain their warrants (AKA when you ask parents why are you grounded? Because I said so).

The discussion about analytical arguments (quals indicts, etc) being insufficient to win debates stems from a failure of the Toulmin model (in a debate context) and from debaters who unconsciously stick to it to the T(oulmin). Layne, Ellis and Rajesh were all like “but guys we make the analytical args and judges don’t vote on them” and then Roy, Scott, Whit and others are like you don’t make them well and the conversation ended.

Being the revolutionary debate mind that I proclaim myself to be, I am going to explain my revision of the Toulmin model which I can guarantee will give you 5-10 more wins next year. The revision sounds simple but is oh so devastating. The revision states this “Arguments must follow logically and therefore contain a claim, warrant and implication.”

Continue reading →

Exploiting Inefficiencies: Moneyball and Opportunities For Innovation in High School Policy Debate

Creativity, as has been said, consists largely of rearranging what we know in order to find out what we do not know. Hence, to think creatively, we must be able to look afresh at what we normally take for granted.
— George Kneller

Michael Lewis’s 2003 bestseller Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game chronicles the innovative approach taken by the Oakland Athletics during the past two decades to field a winning baseball team with a modest payroll. In order to compete with the league’s best teams, the A’s were forced to locate and exploit opportunities to do things better than the rest of baseball. Innovation wasn’t just a luxury but a requirement: if the A’s wanted to win, they had to rethink business-as-usual.

This essay applies the lessons of Moneyball to high school policy debate. In the same way that the A’s exploited inefficiencies in baseball’s labor market to achieve competitive success, students can take advantage of inefficiencies in debate’s argument market to best their opponents. The key is innovation.

Continue reading →

Mailbag Friday-

The 3nr is going to try something on Fridays that could end up being a dumpster fire but only time will tell.

In addition to any posts Bill, Scott or myself post we will also write / comment about things you all want to read about.

So what do we need from you? In the comment section below type out a topic or issue of intrigue. Keep in mind this is read by a bunch of different people so something like “Bill what do you think of the WI state blah blah” will probably not get picked or written about cause most of us could care less about the cheeseheads.

Go to town

Roy

An Update On The3NR.com: Avatars, Comments, & Accounts

So far, so good. The3NR.com has received nearly 3,500 visits during its first six days of existence. We have posted eleven times and received 60 comments from more than ten visitors. And we haven’t really publicized this, yet.

In an attempt to make this site more user-friendly, I wanted to share a few things with our readers.

  1. We have enabled the use of gravatars. If you’d like an avatar to appear next to your name when you comment, simply visit the gravatar site, create an account, and select an avatar image. As long as you remain logged in, your gravatar will appear on The3NR.com as well as any other site that uses the service. Nifty, eh?

  2. In an attempt to prevent comment and trackback spam before it starts, we are using the Askimet spam prevention system. Unfortunately, it has incorrectly identified a few comments as spam and therefore required us to approve them. These false positives will decrease over time as the software learns from its mistakes. In the meantime, we will approve the pending comments as soon as we can. We have also added a captcha system that requires unregistered users to type in a few characters before submitting a comment; this will prevent bots from posting automated spam messages. Any inconvenience in the short term will hopefully be outweighed by the long-term benefits of preventing aggravating spam.

  3. To make things easier, we have enabled readers to register for an account with The3NR.com. If you are a frequent reader/contributor, this will allow you to post without worrying about the spam filter or the captcha system. Remember, you can also subscribe to the site via RSS and subscribe via email to the comments on an individual post (there is a link before you hit “submit” for a new comment that allows you to manage your comment subscription).

Thank you for your continued patronage of The3NR.com. Feel free to email any/all of us with comments or suggestions and please continue posting your thoughts on the articles… that’s why we’re writing.

Debate and Change

Since back in the day when I started sp debate kids have been saying the same thing over and over again

“Oh sp, your a genius and I totally agree with XYZ, however judges don’t like that so untill judges change I will just keep doing the losing thing that I have been doing kthnxbai”.

Most recently Anshu’s sock puppet echoed these sentiments in regards to making arguments about evidence. So lets clear this up once and for all: this is not a chicken/egg thing, debaters drive change- not judges. Let’s look at this logically with 2 examples: K’s and CPs. Here is how debaters caused CP’s to happen

1. Debaters on the neg hated losing

2. They thought “hmm, let me see… how can I … “counter” if you will… all these aff plans…

3. They read some CP’s

4. Judges were like “uh this is weird, don’t know how I feel about this”

5. Bad ass debaters were like “tough I am gonna keep reading this”

6. Judges were like “ok”

Continue reading →

Debate related rules- Good in theory bad in practice

Some have brought up the need for formalized rules or regulations guiding the use and administration of emails, blog evidence etc. Unfortunately the notion of debate community rules seems much like the NPT, a good idea in general but a failure as a whole. I don’t think that most people disagree that use of most blog evidence and email is bad (lets call these signatories of the NPT) but there do exist some who disagree (lets call those the rogue states) who either do not care or who do not find it a bad idea. So where do we go from here?

There seem to be some serious problems to trying to have an organization (be it NFL, NDCA, etc) regulating the use of this stuff / creating rules for it

Continue reading →

Things that are already officially lame on next years poverty topic-part 1

If you read these arguments/do these things, you are lame.

1. The poverty/social services word pic- I have decided that my threshold for voting aff on pics bad vs these cps is the following: if the aff goes to the CP in the 2AC and then makes a thumbs down motion like right mhere

That will pretty much do it. Against teams that read these arguments a lot I will have my vengeance, in this life or the next. Can everyone agree the “alternative energy pic” was

A. top 1 list of stupidest arguments of all time

B. A total waste of time for all parties involved

C. Perhaps the lamest indictment of hippies of all time

How many debates did this come up in? The answer is > the amount that would make me want to kill myself.

Continue reading →

The Cult of Evidence and the Importance of Source Quality

The discussion of new affirmatives and Scott’s most recent post about the SPS article controversy intersect at the issue of how we are teaching students to evaluate evidence. I will write more about this over the coming days, but I wanted to chime in with a few thoughts about this meta-issue before discussing more about new affirmatives or about the SPS article controversy in particular.

My agreement with Roy’s initial post was not intended as an indictment of new affirmatives. Instead, I think the proliferation of poor-quality new affirmatives at season-ending tournaments reveals something important about the state of our activity. In particular, the following questions come to mind:

  1. What does it say about the way we are teaching our students that breaking new affirmatives is seen as so strategic at end-of-the-year championships? Why is it that students feel that they have a better chance of winning when they break even a poor-quality new affirmative than they do when reading one of their existing affirmatives?

  2. Does this represent a positive or negative trend? What should we be doing to nudge the competitive advantage toward a style of debate that rewards engagement with the topic literature and the opposition’s arguments more than evasion and trickery?

I don’t think it was Roy’s intention to “call out” those teams that consistently broke new affirmatives at this year’s TOC or to discourage teams from reading new affirmatives in the future. As I have written, there are certainly strategic benefits to breaking new cases and it is good to encourage students to invest the effort required to write a new case and prepare to defend it.

Continue reading →

SPS Article Controversy

There is a lot of chit chat about this, and I have some rather unconventional thoughts so I wanted to make a quick post here: To be clear I would not do this, and would discourage anyone I knew who was considering doing it.  I guess I’m a K debater at heart because I don’t want to defend the practice but I do want to criticize the response with a vague textless alt. 

 

1. Anyone involved in debate should be able to write and publish (in any way) anything a non debate person would be able to so long as they attach their name to it. 

2. This happens a lot more than people think- A LOT MORE. It’s the nature of the internet and the sheer number of people who are/at some point are involved in debate.  The number of debates I have judged where a card was read from a message board, an email, a blog, or a “comment” on an article/blog has climbed dramatically and I would say is now over 50% at most tournaments. 

3. I am much, repeat MUCH less concerned about a coach/debater writing an article than I am about card clipping, prep time stealing, tab room shenanigans and other clearly unethical behavior that may not influence a win or loss as much (poor disclosure/incomplete citations, opaque judge conflicts etc). 

 

3+4= very few people have any business attacking the “unethical” practices of others. 

4. If you are aff you should have a solid defense of your case that comes from peer reviewed journals and is written by qualified authors. You should also be able to explain why evidence that does not meet rigorous academic standards should be discarded- if you can’t you will lose to way more University Wire/Sac bee cards than cards written by other participants.  Part of the reason this is a problem is because of the delcining standards of what constitutes evidence, the “cult of evidence” that thinks any card auto beats an analytic, and because debaters are taught to just read cards and not critically think and deconstruct arguments ( a definate failing on the part of coaches).