Coaching
A Good Place to Start
One of the reasons I support NFA-LD debate is that each year I get to learn so much about the particular topic being debated. Whenever anyone brings up Greater Horn of Africa, renewable energy, Cuba, transportation, etc… I feel so knowledgeable and almost always can engage in a discussion regarding possible policy solutions and their [...]
Critical Thinking
Throughout higher education critical thinking is a central tenant of most college classes. Most students must complete a “critical thinking” requirement in order to get their degree. Debate is certainly one of the best activities to teach critical thinking and is one of the reasons it is my passion to teach and share with other [...]
Interesting comment
From the Sunset Cliffs post an anonymous person writes: all the preparation is wasted. opp strategy is always Topicality, procedurals, and counterplans. the debate doesn’t start until the 2nd speech. at least thats what it seems like. If true, I think this is a very damaging to both the future adoption of the event by [...]
Speaker Responsibilities
For those of you who are new to debate or new to NFA-LD I thought it may be helpful to walk through each of the six speeches in NFA-LD and discuss, in detail, the different responsibilities and goals of each speech. I’ve discussed these in brief in this series before but wanted to expand each [...]
Space Tourism – Run before 2012, or it won’t matter!
Longtime fans of this site, or people who have hung around the circuit long enough know that I have a tendency to write strange cases. Earlier this semester, I threw together a case as a handout for my Argumentation & Debate course. The case took me about 30 minutes to write (Lexis Nexis for the [...]
Losing
A necessary byproduct of a competitive system is that someone has to lose each NFA-LD debate round. Since we employ a win-loss system for determing who wins one debater, will, by rule, leave each room with a loss. Losing can be a very valuable part of the debate tournament. It mirrors life really well. You [...]
Debate is a game
Some great comments on recent posts hashing out why we do debate (here as well). One of those comments, which as been agreed upon, is the statement that “debate is a game.” I hear this often and it is spoken as if it’s carved in stone. I, for one, disagree. NFA-LD Debate for me is [...]
Some Clarity on Funding Theory
I would like offer some of my thoughts on why and to what extent an affirmative must discuss funding. These are my current thoughts, but I’m really interested in some discussion to help me reach some clarity. This seemed to come up a lot this weekend. 1) An affirmative must provide something under the plan [...]
Showing Weakness While Judging Debate
While judging one of the out rounds of NFA L/D this last weekend, the other two judges and I had the opportunity to answer a few questions about our debate paradigms, a fairly normal practice these days. The question was, “How do you feel about the rules of NFA L/D concerning conversation rate and speed?” [...]
Update #1 to Season Sweepstakes
Here is the first update to our yearlong awards. Since all of the raw data from which this is tabulated is available on forensicstournament.net, and will likely remain so all year long, this should be a fairly transparent process. For answers to questions about where these numbers came from (for example, where is the guy [...]
National Forensic Journal
For anyone who is new to NFA-LD I wanted to point out a very valuable forensics resource available at the National Forensics Association website: the National Forensics Journal. There are tons of articles specifically related to NFA-LD theory that an enterprising debater could cut to win theory arguments. Any other sites you use to find [...]
Fiat – the magic wand of debate
Fiat is a term that is often used in debates and I wanted to go over some basics. Fiat is a term which means “let it be.” In debate, its come to represent the idea that debates should revolve around the “should” question instead of the “could” question. So rather than asking, could the US [...]
