Over the course of the summer I recorded several lectures that have been posted to Debate Vision. While some readers might have already seen them, it can’t hurt to share them again here on The 3NR. On the heels of the film study lecture, this one discusses strategies for learning by watching others debate — it is embedded below the fold.
Category Archives: Drills/Practice
Learning From Hip-Hop: Lessons for Debaters from How To Rap: The Art and Science of the Hip-Hop MC
“Learn everything you can, anytime you can, from anyone you can—there will always come a time when you will be grateful you did.” — Sarah Caldwell
If one looks closely enough, there are lessons to be learned about debate almost everywhere. The book Moneyball—Michael Lewis’s look at the exploitation of market inefficiencies in Major League Baseball—for example, can help us consider ways to exploit market inefficiencies in debate. While management strategies in professional baseball would seem at first glance to have little to do with high school debate, important lessons can nonetheless be learned—if only we take the time to dig a bit deeper.
In the same way that Moneyball inspired reflection about market inefficiencies in debate, Paul Edwards’ How to Rap: The Art and Science of the Hip-Hop MC provides the astute observer with a wealth of lessons for high school debaters. How to Rap is a comprehensive guide to hip-hop MCing that includes lengthy discussions of content, flow, writing, and delivery. Based on interviews with more than 100 MCs, Edwards’ book “marks a cultural coming-of-age for hip-hop — the first comprehensive poetics of this new literary form.”
While the entire book is fascinating, the section about delivery is particularly useful for high school debate. This article refashions Edwards’ advice to prospective MCs and applies it to debate. Five areas of advice are outlined: Breath Control, Taking Care of Your Voice, Enunciation, Vocal Style, and Presence/Swagger.
Good Debating Is Good Writing: 16 Common Inefficiencies
Debate is a speaking activity, certainly, but it is also a writing activity. Good constructive speeches rely in large part on well-written prepared materials, but rebuttals are where the real writing occurs. To deliver a powerful rebuttal, students must verbalize their arguments clearly and persuasively—but do so extemporaneously, without a script. Good speaking, like good writing, must be clear, concise, and well organized: the content needs to be allowed to shine through.
As part of this summer’s Hoya Spartan Scholars program, students were given an opportunity to transcribe and edit their rebuttal speeches. The transcription process is tedious—it takes a lot of time and concentration to accurately and completely transcribe a debate speech—but the payout is substantial. By transforming a spoken speech into a written text, students can more rigorously assess the content of their speeches and dramatically improve their efficiency and language choices. And by doing so, the connection between good speaking and good writing becomes obvious.
In the course of editing students’ transcriptions, one thing became abundantly clear: debaters do not communicate efficiently. Most rebuttals overflow with filler language, distracting sentence structures, and imprecise word choices. This undermines persuasiveness, of course, but it also directly sacrifices content by wasting precious speech time. The goal of a debater should be to effectively communicate as many important arguments as possible to the judge within the time constraints. Doing so requires not just speed but efficiency. And while gains in speaking speed are certainly valuable, improvements in efficiency can be much more dramatic.
A list of 16 common efficiency problems is provided below the fold. Did we miss one? Share it in the comments.
Do you want to be top speaker at the toc? Part 2- stop cutting cards, start working on craft
Part 1 discussed in detail how to work on the actual speaking to improve your points, part 2 is going to discuss a few ways to improve the things you are saying. Before doing that I will quickly address some questions I got about part 1.
Do you want to be top speaker at the toc? part 1
A few have emailed/posted questions about prep for the toc. Loyal 3nr readers know most every question about how to win the TOC was answered step by step in my pulitzer prize winning series (here, here, here, ). One thing that was not addressed in great detail there was how to become the top speaker at the TOC and so this series will address this.
1AR Choice
The 1AR, like the lamer Matrix movies, is all about choice. A good 1AR picks from the options presented in the 2AC and hammers home a few key points, it doesn’t crappily extend every argument. I feel like past posts have gone into why this is so ad nausea, so this post will take for granted that you agree the 1AR must collapse and will instead focus on an example. In the attached xl document you will find the flow of a politics debate through the 2NC. The 2NC has done a decent job of extending the disad- no arguments are dropped, there are diverse answers to each 2AC argument, and there is some impact jive at the top. If you give the 1AR you will find yourself giving politics 1AR’s like this frequently because people have blocks to most of the 2AC arguments given in the demo speech.
Below the fold I am going to discuss ways to chose what arguments to go for and why, but before you read that look at the flow and think about what arguments you would select to go for and why. Think about different circumstances
-do they have a cp?
-is the cp plan inclusive?
-are you going to win a big risk of the case or a solvency deficit?
Then think about why these factors might affect what arguments you chose to extend.
“So, How Do I Get Better At Debate:” Answering Debate’s Toughest Question
Debate is hard — there are no shortcuts to success. Students often look for a blueprint that will get them from the 2-4 bracket to the finals; in response, coaches emphasize that there’s no substitute for hard work. “Nose, meet grindstone” seems to be the best answer anyone faced with the “how do I get better at debate” question ever musters. But there are tangible steps that debaters can take to improve: this website alone has published hundreds of articles offering advice to students at all levels, and there is an abundance of material available in other places that can help put students on the right track.
But something is still missing. How can debaters take all of these various suggestions, tips, and drills and integrate them into a coherent plan for overall improvement? What is needed is a curriculum: an integrated, complete course of study and practice that a debater can use to transform the raw material of hard work into a finished product of competitive excellence. And while the specific details of any particular student’s curriculum ought to be developed with their needs and goals in mind, it is certainly possible to compose a general outline of a course of study that can benefit all debaters.
This article is the first in a series that will attempt to do exactly that: provide students with a basic outline that they can use to create a personalized curriculum to use outside of the classroom or formal organized practices that will help them acquire the knowledge and skills needed to compete successfully in debate. This first article will introduce the guiding principles that underlie the recommended curriculum; part two will provide suggestions for specific coursework.
Debate Telephone
I was reading this book on comedy writing and it had some chapter about how the reason most people aren’t funny is that they don’t really come up with their own jokes, they basically just re-hash jokes people wrote a long time ago that they have seen before. Since the majority of humor is based on surprise, these recycled jokes lose some of their impact with each retelling. On top of that, the more times a joke gets told by different people the more of its original meaning gets lost and the less funny it becomes.
Writing Taglines with EASE
By Christina Tallungan
Writing taglines for evidence can be tricky. There is no one exact right tagline for every card so it is helpful to remember some basic guidelines:
Efficiency –
Write taglines without flowery language and cliches.
Avoid unnecessary adverbs or adjectives, e.g., completely, totally, probably, somewhat.
Substitute commas or dashes for conjunctions like “because” or “due to”
Do NOT write “in order to” instead of just writing “to.”
Accuracy –
Re-read evidence before tagging it in a file – make sure it accurately reflects the author’s
conclusion or argument.
Do NOT overstate your evidence, e.g., say the impact is extinction when the card does not say
that.
Consider the strategy of using evidence, but do NOT manipulate words in the evidence to make
argument that is not supported by the author.
Make sure the relationship you are expressing in the tagline is actually said in the evidence, e.g.,
an author saying that “global warming causes sea level rise” cannot be changed to “sea level
rise causes global warming.” Debaters have a tendency to look for evidence that has key
words and overlook the relationship the author makes between those key words. Double check
your thinking and do NOT get overly excited because you found a card with key words.
Strategy –
Consider how this piece of evidence will be used in a debate round before writing the tagline.
The purpose for the card will determine the starting point for the tagline. For example, a uniqueness card for the military recruitment DA will not start by saying “Economic recession
causes an increase in military recruitment.” While that tagline is accurate, it is not framed in an
ideal manner as a uniqueness card. It will help the judge understand the purpose of the card
better if is it framed more clearly as “High military recruitment now – impoverished youth.”
Examples –
This section could have been called “Warrants,” but that did not sound as good. Examples are
the data in the evidence that proves your overall argument in the tagline true. These are the
parts that you will need to highlight in a comparative warrant debate. As a result, include these
in your taglines, e.g., “Political capital high now – State of the Union address. This example
shows how someone can include quick examples in a tagline to distinguish your evidence from an
opponent’s.
There is an activity that is attached for some practice writing taglines.
Game Winning Analysis
One of the things judges/coaches beat into debaters heads over and over again is that they need more explanation of things. Instead of explaining the importance of this instead I thought I would post some examples of how to explain things better.