This is an article I began writing for the first edition of the last word but was weeded out in the editing process. Several people who read this disagreed with a lot of the advice, so bear in mind this is just my opinion- if your lab leaders disagree with something/tell you to do something a different way you should listen to them.

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Let’s talk about how to make debates cleaner. By clean, I am referring to organization: a messy debate is one where arguments are poorly organized and not grouped together logically. A clean debate is where the debaters make a conscious effort to sort like arguments together.

Why is this important? A clean debate

1. Makes giving your speeches easier-it allows you to avoid repetition by putting all related arguments close to one another. It allows you to strategically “view” the debate much easier as you don’t have to flip back and forth between sheets to get the big picture. It helps you assess priorities. It makes it easier to not drop things.

2. It makes judging debates substantially easier. One of the hardest things about judging (assuming the judge is attempting to limit intervention) is evaluating a debate where the crucial issue(s) lack clash. What I mean is lets say the debate’s central question is whether or not to evaluate consequences or just look at the motives of an action to determine whether or not the plan should be done. These debates can often devolve into “two ships passing in the night” whereby each team spends all their time explaining their arguments and no time responding to the other teams arguments or  engaging in comparisons. This is often a direct result of messiness: the 1AC will have a contention about morality, the neg will read some cards on their disad about why consequences should be evaluated, and while these two sets of arguments are responding to one another that they are occurring on different sheets  acts as a kind of psychological barrier to the students debating- they refuse to compare them. This is often the case in debates where both the 1AC and the negs go for disad have the same impact- for example war on the Korean peninsula. The central question of these debates is not magnitude because both impacts are basically the same. Probability is the most important factor- and it should be assessed in terms of what is the relative risk of the adv vs the risk of the da. Negatives do slightly better here usually because they have been trained to emphasize disad turns the case, but there is never the kind of comparison judges really need.

Enough on that, take my word for it, cleaner debates are better. That being  said here are some general tips in no particular order for cleaning up debates. Most of them relate to road mapping and the process of deciding where to put arguments, so these are things you can instantly do without needing a lot of prep- and after talking to some fellow judges recently I can say these are definately the kind of thing you want to be doing if you are looking to improve your points.

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Last month, The 3NR published the first in a series of articles intended to help answer the most difficult question that debate coaches are frequently asked: “How do I get better at debate?”. Many committed students are frustrated when their hard work does not produce winning records. At times, it can seem like banging one’s head against a wall: despite doing everything that is asked of you, your winning percentage just doesn’t seem to be improving.

A basic, overarching approach to debate training was outlined in the first article in this series. In particular, four guiding principles were advanced to assist students as they developed a personal debate curriculum:

1. Improvement happens fastest with consistent daily effort.
2. Reducing broad concepts into small, manageable tasks is essential.
3. Integrative approaches are the most effective way to pursue meaningful improvements.
4. The work done outside the classroom determines the value of the work done inside the classroom.

The best way to approach improvement, it was argued, is to develop a personal set of “courses” that are planned in advance and which supplement the training one receives from formal classes and practices. In this article, some of these specific courses will be introduced.

This “course catalog” is not meant to be comprehensive; one of the most difficult lessons that every debater needs to learn is that—unlike in other academic courses—it is impossible to “finish” or “master” the curriculum of policy debate. There is always more to learn and more to prepare. The goal, instead, is to help students construct a personal curriculum that best serves their needs and which offers a pathway to improvement outside the classroom.

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