On freedom

One might argue for the necessity of freedom. You ask why is freedom important? What values must you weigh when discussing the validity, importance, consequences, costs, or tradeoffs of freedom? These are things that can be compared when you are arguing against freedom. When do you weigh the benefits of freedom against the costs it imposes and when do these costs take precedent? What other kinds of values clash against freedom and why are they more important? If you can defend these values and argue why they are more important, you will win the debate over freedom.

What values are more important than freedom? Security: The assurance that one can and will in relative safety without exposure to unnecessarily probabilistic chances of danger or harm. But what price is one willing to pay to obtain this assurance and against what backdrop of freedom? How far are you willing to go to ensure your safety?

You must answer these questions in formulating your own response and your position. You must have set a line down of what you feel is an appropriate cost to pay for assurance and why that must govern the nature of the debate.

Meta-debating: Explaining why you are winning

1. At the point that a debater is able to perceive and evaluate the quality of his or her own performance, this evaluation should be made public to the audience as often as it will benefit his or her position.

2. If a preceeding speaker has declined to refute any of your side's advocacy, it would be advantageous to point out the consequent strength of these arguments.

3. Arguments that are un-rebuted gain exceptional ground in a debate because they are seen as arguments which have been thoroughly made, gone unrejected, and thus must hold some level of legitimacy.

4. Having said this, the converse is also paramount: The ability to understand, evaluate, compare, and even analyze the opposition's arguments can only aid the credibility of one's own arguments.

5. If one can fully understand the opponent's arguments and where they are weak, these weaknesses or flaws can be pointed out.

But even more useful is the ability to comprehensively identify where the strength or validity of one's arguments begin and end. Once these boundaries are established, one can take the debate outside of the box and into the ground where these arguments no longer hold.

Once you have evaluated the strength and limits of the opponents arguments you apply your own structure or direction to the debate and describe thoroughly why the opponents' strength now longer applies outside of this box and your own arguments take hold in this realm.

In this world, you make the rules and anything you say goes. Your opponent is at your mercy and you apply your own interpretation of right and wrong, of proper and improper, of beneficial and harmful. If you understand where your arguments apply and where your opponents' arguments apply, you can choose and identify which places, which contexts are best to evaluate the debate in.

You pick what kind of scenarios is most proper for filtering through the debate: In what place should the debate apply? In what kind of situation? Why are these scenarios important and why are they chosen?

Meta-debating 2: You make the rules

You make the rules


You define for the judge how the debate should be evaluated: what grounds and what terms should be taken into consideration and why yours are more truthful, legitimate, or proper than the opponents.

Often time, each duo of debaters portray the world through a certain view. You must be able to compare these overall views of the world and identify where the strengths and weaknesses of each are.

A team which advocates the reduction of injustice in the world may propose that the world is currently injust, which is harmful and should be rectified. As the opposition, you will probably argue the world is either not injust, should be injust, that injustice is not harmful, or should not be rectified. Each of these is a position and carries a myriad of approaches in it's own right.

Approaches:

A. Portraying the world as just will likely involve examination of the evidence the opposition has presented and criticizing it or eliminating it, as well as advancing one's one evidence of justice existing in the world.

B. On a more normative level, the notion could be advanced about how injustice is either acceptable or not as harmful as the opponent portrays. Evidence could certainly be advanced asserting demonstrating the triviality of the injustice or the consequences that it brings. If one makes an argument about how economic inequality leads the poor to lead lower quality lives, you could argue that being poor does not necessarily make one less happy. Happiness need not be material; and a poor man could easily be happy about many other factors which need to correspond with possession or wealth. Happiness may correspond to social worth, artistic worth, freedom to pursue individualistic endeavors, personal ability, and many others. In such a scenario, the injustice of economic inequality is reduced by the poccession of other non-economic possessions which balance out that injustice.

C. On the other hand, one could even argue that economic injustice is desirable or morally or philosophically inherent, necessary, or acceptable. One could proceed to demonstrate the absurdity of equalizing all measures of quality in the world and eliminating parities in anything. One could go even deeper and say the levels of differences between individuals is what contributes to one's identify in an otherwise uniform world: That one's level of education or income or privilege is what sets human beings apart and gives meaning to the individual. That one can mark one's own distinction in the world only through the ability to be better or worse than others. At the point where there can be no differences in qualities affecting individuals, there is no longer any distinction between people- they are identical and replaceable. When individual's self qualities are undermined, their reason for existence is undermined and they lose any real meaning to exist or take any action in life.

Nervousness and pauses

A common difficulty for new and beginning debaters is unsurprisingly, the ability to speak continuously and smoothly without pauses or interruptions.

A particularly great challenge is merely possessing enough concrete material with which to fill a speech.

All these is further worsened by the nervousness of speaking in front of an audience you may not know and may not feel familiar with.

All debaters, even experienced and award-ladden debaters occasionally face the tremble of losing their nerves and worrying how they will perform to par.


However, experience with public speaking enables one to harness these nerves and develop an augmented sense of confidence that is even further driven by the heightened emotions of speaking aloud. The same energy that makes one feel nervous can be harnessed and turned into raw excitement, happiness, and even a broad range of other manipulable emotions.

As students accumulate experience speaking in front of a crowd, they will develop enough confidence and familiarity that they begin to 'speed', or speak quickly out of excitement. This is often further exacerbated by the pressure to 'cover' as much as they can, to get through all the material they have built of from listening to the debate and are eager to let loose on the opponent. The more knowledge and familiarity a debater has with a subject, the more likely he/her is to speak quickly and confidently.

On the otherhand unfamiliarity with a topic may often lead debaters to feel lost, confused, empty, neutral, and dispassionate about a debate. In these scenarios, the ability to evoke fluidity of thought and composure of words is greatly challenged, and debaters may find themselves literally at a loss for words.They may feel defeated, and worse of all, clueless, all while 'on the spot'. In these scenarios, the only viable option to traverse is to empty one's mind, concentrate, and belt of the first thing which comes to mind.

The ability to form a continuous thought is of paramount importance in debate, and the process of rattling one's raw thoughts off enable one to quickly recover and formulate a continuous thought chain. Any thought will do, including how one feels. This is an almost essential strategy to understanding's one's own frame of mind and communicating it to the audience, allowing them to understand where you will go next. After identifying your foremost thought, it is helpful to continue elaborating upon the most recently discussed topic before proceeding to the next logical topic.

Ideas you may have long held about the subject or feelings you hold quite strongly may often become expressed in the following stages because they are what's most familiar to your mind. The ability to utilize these thoughts and argue them convincingly is what separates a clear and focused argument from an uncoherent, disjointed, trailing off of thoughts.

Persuasion is paramount and must always be applied to every word that comes out of the mouth. If a sentence does not aid in the process of persuasion, is is better not spoken at all. Because adjudicators must evaluate and process an hour of continuous dialogue, a long pause allowing one to develop one's next idea may well be advantageous to the debater, as the judge can him/herself pause to absorb all that he/she has heard. If instead a debater chooses to enumerate ideas that while relevent to the topic, does not aid in persuasion, the audience will him/herself lose focus, and miss out on the information.

Because providing enough knowledge and information about a singular topic to fill 7 minutes is so demanding, debaters are led to fill the gap with any information that can be fit into the debate. While a useful strategy for beginners, it should gradually enable debaters to develop familiarity and confidence in speaking. At some point, the ability to draw ideas and knowledge spontaneously from every day life and turn it into persuasive reasoning becomes the goal of the debate.

There is a tradeoff. While the absence of speech and ideas to fill the prescribed time slot may feel diminutive to a debater, the tendency to turn to less persuasive content has ups and downs. On one hand it enables one to develop confidence in speaking continuously and spontaneously 'on the fly', it frequently damages one's relevance and authority on the subject matter at hand. No beginning debater should rely excessively on either approaches: While relevance and continuity of thought are both importance, neither one can be sacrificed completely in favor of the other. Furthermore, individual adjudicators often have their own perception of which one carries more importance and assign evaluation accordingly. It is advantageous to strike a balance, and perhaps experiment with either approaches whereever appropriate.

There are debates where energy requires one to spout off as much knowledge as possible and debates where the topic has already grown so comprehensive, the debater is better off taking a focused approach, and making short deliberate points while taking the time and energy to carefully compose them silently whilst pausing.

Organization and persuasion

Many individuals new to debate will not understand the mechanical order and arragement, as well as presentation of debate speeches.

Because judges must listen to an hour of continuous dialogue which switches position on the topic every seven minutes, a highly organized and divided speaking presentation is paramount to communicating with an audience without losing them.

Each speaker must begin with a preview and introduction of the subject matter which will come forth in the next seven minutes. This should be substantive enough that the judge can foresee the subject of the forthcoming speech, but brief enough it does not obstruct the remaining material. Introductions ideally boil down the primary persuasive point of the speech into a short paragraph, identifying what the speaker's position on the topic is and why that position is justified. The preview, also called a roadmap, introduces each discrete block of argument with a single sentence or phrase, enabling the judge to identify the nature of each argument. The bulk of the speech is further divided into matter addressing previously raised arguments and matter further developing one's own individual position. Speeches finally end with a brief identification with the concepts raised throughout the speech and a final note about the strength of one's performance.

This last point is critical because it aides the judge in deciding how well each individual has performed -- if you can't determine yourself how you did compared to your competitors, why should your judges? This in fact the single best opportunity to convince your judge that you in fact provided the most persuasive and most important arguments, even if you didn't. While your judges may not have felt strongly about the arguments you made beforehand, identifying now why they are superior to the arguments of others forces the judge to compare the entirety of your arguments to the basis of what others argued and evaluate the comparison on the spot. Should your address be remotely convincing, they will absorb your advocacy of why your speech was superior.

Introduction - WUDC

Students are given a narrow and select topic to discuss which usually attempts to bring a tangible improvement to society. Students must propose advantages supporting the topic as well as advocate for harms inflicted in implementing the proposed motion.

 Students are given a ranking of 1-4 (1 being the highest) depending on how well they argue the topic. Students typically argue through 6 'rounds' or topics over the course of a day and switch sides or positions with each successive round.

The topic for each individual round is usually given 15 minutes before the start of the debate, allowing students an opportunity to jot down some basic ideas and compose a structure for their argumentation.

Students successively provide 7 minute arguments supporting or opposing the topic at hand. Speeches typically begin with 3-4 minutes deconstructing all preceding arguments before advancing to forward one's own arguments.

Speeches are evaluated on structure, organization, persuasiveness, composure, comprehensibility, and informativeness.

Although each student's arguments are evaluated on their own, they must form a mutual compatibility with other speakers siding with their position on the topic. The higher a student is able to incorporate cooperativeness and teamwork into their argumentation, the more successful his/her performance.

At the same time, students must ensure their own argumentation remains unique and distinct advanced by others on his/her team. Arguments which can be attributed to other speakers typically receive little creddit.

Besides defending the merits of one's own positions, debaters are further to engage in depth with arguments advanced by opposition speakers.

Usually this means providing counterclaims or evidence to delegitimize arguments of the other side. Common approaches include citing counterexamples where the opposition's argument is untrue or fallacious. Another approach includes providing evidence that the argument in fact should be better interpreted as more helpful to yourside than theirs.

Strong arguments and refutations are those that incorporate reasonable common sense and easily accessible points of information. General knowledge is always rewarded while overwhelmingly technical or jorgony language interferes with general comprehension of the debate.

A lack of disagreement on specific points you have raised indicates either a lack of comprehension from opposing students or a failure to advance an argument sufficiently deep enough to rebut.

At the close of the debate, speakers are assigned an individual score between 70-80 corresponding to the overall quality of his/her performance.

At the close of a competition, these scores are tallied and summed up for all speakers and rewards are given on the basis of score accumulation and of team performance.

Understanding The Worlds Universities Debate Format (Simon Quinn, 2005)