Competing
Starter Packet for 2011-12 Topic
I attach here a starter packet for teams looking to begin practicing. It is likely of lower quality than the larger teams already have, but it should allow small and/or new teams to start practicing right away. It includes a currency manipulation aff (donated by Danny), some specific negative against currency manipulation, a specific DA against currency [...]
Good introduction to trade debate
Debate Central is a project of the National Center for Policy Analysis where overviews and evidence is provided to help spur high school policy debate. In the spring of 2010 UIL had a topic that dealt with free trade versus protectionism. While it’s not exactly the same topic we’re covering the site features a great [...]
Debating the Most Intuitive Cases Under the Resolution
Part of being a successful debater is having a solid case. What exactly qualifies as a solid case is open for debate (pun intended). I have always been an advocate of debating the most intuitive case under the resolution. Some of my contemporaries believe in cutting obscure cases that either barely meet the burdens of [...]
Taming the Kritik: How to Beat a Kritik Debater in LD
Today I’ll explain how to engage in kritik debate and some useful strategies to beat back the dreaded K. Although the kritik remains rare in LD debate it is not entirely absent from rounds and tournaments. Some enterprising debaters have changed the headings to DA – Counterplan, but make no mistake – It’s a kritik. [...]
Summer Prep 101: An LD’ers Guide to Taking Advantage of Your Summer Break. Part 3 of 3
So, you’ve finished most of the heavy lifting necessary for next year’s resolution. What’s left is Contention Development targeted at the most likely cases/arguments. At this point in your summer research you should have quite a few articles that you’ve collected and turned into policy chains. From these policy chains you should have generated tags [...]
Summer Prep 101: An LD’ers Guide to Taking Advantage of Your Summer Break. Part 2 of 3
Last week we discussed researching the topic area and building a policy chain. This week we can start putting it all together by tagging and/or frontlining all of the literature in your policy chain. At this point there is no right or wrong way to approach cutting/frontlining. As long as you’re gathering evidence for good [...]
Amended Resolutions
Per an email sent to the IE-L on Thursday, May 5 at 5:49pm the Lincoln Douglas Committee has revised the wording of the 5 resolutions: The Lincoln Douglas Committee has revised the wording of the 5 resolutions for clarification reasons. If you have already voted, and feel you need to change your ballot, send me [...]
Why do you participate in debate?
Now that the season is over I think it’d be a great time to reflect: why do you participate in debate? I often find these conversations are helpful at the end of the season when so many coaches and students are experiencing burnout and may feel like all the hard work of the season was [...]
Summer Prep 101: An LD’ers Guide to Taking Advantage of Your Summer Break. Part 1 of 3
Being a winning LD debater starts with your work ethic. For both the novice and the advanced competitor, success in Lincoln-Douglas debate is about research. Those who are willing to do the research give themselves a competitive advantage in every round they enter. This is because they understand the topic area well enough to articulate to [...]
BREAKING – Board suspends vote – will keep this year’s topic one more year
Just got an interesting email on the IE-L regarding next year’s NFA-LD topic… … The NFA-LD committee has just finished receiving results from the 2010-2011 coaches NFA-LD survey that was sent out two weeks ago to all active NFA member schools. Apparently, preliminary results indicate that a majority of debaters have decided against engaging the [...]
Enumerated v Implied Powers
As mentioned in a comment on Michael’s Kritik post one way to view the NFA-LD rules is that they enumerate a certain set of “powers” or “positions” the negative can run. (This argument may or may not also apply to the affirmative in NFA-LD, but this discussion will focus solely on the negative.) A few [...]
Children case?
Not sure if anyone is doing a case on children’s mental illness but I found this article interesting for the negative – basically, stop medicating and start parenting! I think a good generic disadvantage that would be good to bring to a tournament is the idea that treating mental illness with medication causes more harm [...]
