Scott P has some basic search terms suggestions at The 3NR

Alex Gulakov commented the following about Bing:

Bing is also worth mentioning. It’s the new search engine Microsoft unveiled

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Roy has a great post at the 3NR on tournament preparation.

While I am a true believer that 90 percent of debate tournament success comes in pre tournament preparation (good research, practice speeches, effective organization and block writing etc) the remaining 10 percent is obviously vital to your win/loss record and shiny speaker awards.

This post is designed to help you be at your best for those 3 or so days you are at the tournament.

1.)    Sleep- Sleep is the most valuable commodity at debate tournaments.  Most people don’t usually get enough of it and it shows.  Your goal should be to get 7ish hours of sleep a night.  Your most important debate rounds are usually at the end of the day so your energy and focus needs to be there 12 or so hours after waking up.  If you feel so inclined to pull an all nighter (not saying I recommend it) I would do it the night before you leave for a tournament so the night you get to the tournament you can get to sleep at a decent time.  In general there are two types of people who don’t get enough sleep at tournaments.

You can read the post here.

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Stefan Bauschard

Introduction

I think that as long as you properly conceptualize, write, and execute the states counterplan in a given debate, you can win almost every negative debate with it.

I think this is true for three basic reasons:

(1) Theory. Affirmative debaters are bad at erecting theoretical restraints on the negative and judges are reluctant to enforce any theoretical restraints that affirmatives erect.  Nearly unlimited negative fiat means negatives can write counterplan texts to circumvent almost any affirmative arguments against the counterplan.

(2) Reality. The states are largely the domestic policy makers.  There is almost no literature that speaks to the need for federal action in a world in which all of the states (and federal territories) essentially implement the substantive mandates of the affirmative plan. It's quite rare that the state action cannot solve the affirmative advantages as well as federal action can.

(3) Offense. It is much easier for the negative to win offense against federal action than it is for the affirmative to win offense against state action. This is true for three reasons. One, disadvantages to federal action, particularly politics, are substantively stronger and have bigger impacts than disadvantages to state action. Two, the negative can spike almost any disadvantage to the counterplan they know is coming in the counterplan text.  The need to have all parts of the plan be topical substantially limits the ability of the affirmative to spike negative disadvantages in the plan text. Three, the structure of the debate is rigged against the affirmative's ability to debate counterplans -- negatives have 13 minutes in the block to answer affirmative disadvantages and defend their own while affirmatives have only a small amount of time in the 1AR to answer negative disadvantages and defend/develop their own disadvantage(s) that they linked to the counterplan.

In this post, I will explain how to conceptualize, write, and execute the states counterpan in any given debate taking advantage of Reality, Theory, and Offense to win the debate. Although at times I will discuss them separately, the interplay of the three brings even more power to the counterplan.

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What follows is a an organized collection of all of the cards that have been put out at various camps to answer the states counterplan for different affirmative cases.

This listing is not comprehensive in that it only includes cards from camp materials that we've had access to to date (8/2) and we have not reproduced every single states counterplan answer card -- only the ones that made different arguments. We did our best to minimize the reproduction of repetitive evidence.

We hope that you will be able to take advantage of this organized collection in a number of ways:

a) If you are running one of these affirmatives, this is a quick way to gain some states counterplan answers

b) If you are interested in running the states counterplan, you should go through each of these arguments and write blocks to answer them, as well as a specific counterplan text for each affirmatives. You can find an organized listing of the various plans here.

c) You should be able to quickly see what affirmatives have strong states counterplan answers and what ones do not.  We suggest running an affirmative with a strong set of states counterplan answers.  We also suggest beating as many affirmatives as you can with the states counterplan and then spending your time preparing more specific strategies against other affirmatives.  Given the weakness of some of these states counterplan answers, you should be able to quickly see what affirmatives you can beat with the states counterplan.

We also strongly suggest Winning the States Counterplan in (Almost) Every Debate

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Victory Briefs Daily has a great post about winning in L-D at NFLs....

As we lead up to this year’s National Forensic League National Tournament, Victory Briefs Daily will be providing reflections from a number of past National Champions in a variety of events, from our archives and from more recent conversations. To start us off, here are some reflections from the 2006 National Champion, Douglas Jeffers, originally composed a year after his victory. His advice still rings true today!

Jeffers speaks:

Hello all…. I wish you all the very best of luck, and I hope you all have a delightful experience. I have been asked to share four thoughts with you all as you get ready for the big week.

Nationals is certainly one of a kind in my opinion. It is much bigger than almost any other tournament you are likely to attend, and it certainly takes the most time. Nationals can be intimidating, and a week of debate can seem grueling, but I really want to encourage all of you to enjoy yourselves. I enjoyed debating at Nationals more than at any other tournament of my career — though I can think of one very good reason for that — and I hope to share a few words that will make the experience more enjoyable for you.

First, don’t stress yourself out during the tournament. It is spread out over a week, and there is plenty of downtime. Whatever you do don’t spend all of it feverishly prepping and getting anxious about the next round. It probably won’t help you any, and it will most likely only make you flustered in your next round, instead, relax a bit, and enjoy the tournament.

Second, don’t complain about the judging. Though this is always good advice, I think it is very important at Nationals. You ought to know going in what the judging pool will expect. Debaters with smart arguments and the ability to clearly communicate them win at Nationals. You know this now, prepare accordingly. Don’t base everything you are planning to do on sneaky flow tricks, and then complain when you lose, things will be no fun for you or anyone else.  Read more

Bill Batterman has a great post at the3nr.com about winning in policy at the major national tournmanets, particularly CFLs:

The National Catholic Forensic League held its annual Grand National Tournament this past weekend in Albany, New York. Featuring a mix of national circuit powerhouses and local teams from circuits across the nation, Catholic Nationals is one of the most unique tournaments on the high school policy debate calendar. Hosted every Memorial Day Weekend, it challenges debaters to survive ten rounds in two days while adapting to the full spectrum of judging styles and experiences.

While many programs have decided not to attend the Grand Nationals in recent years, it remains a difficult test of adaptation and an invaluable preparation opportunity for squads hoping to go deep at NFL Nationals in June. Albany marked my seventh trip to CFL in the past eleven years. In what follows, I will offer five lessons any team can learn from my experience at this year’s tournament. Whether you will be competing in Birmingham in a few weeks or not, the CFL Tournament can provide some invaluable insights into our activity that any debater should appreciate.

5. Five Minutes Of Preparation Time Will Expose Your Weaknesses

On some circuits, five minutes of preparation time per side is standard operating procedure. On other circuits, the norm is eight minutes or even ten minutes. For teams that are used to having more prep time at their disposal, debating with only five minutes available can be difficult to handle.

With limited prep time, it becomes even more crucial than ever that debaters not waste this scarce resource on things that could have—and should have—been done before the round. If you’re the 2A, you need to have 2AC blocks written and organized for all the positions you’ve anticipated or encountered earlier in the season. If you’re the 2N, you need to have 2NC blocks written and organized for both the generic and specific strategies you are planning to go for. In some cases, you can answer an argument extemporaneously. But if the lack of a block will cost you even 15 seconds of prep time, it is better to spend the time to write it before the tournament.

Ideally, prep time should be spent thinking about the debate and discussing it with your partner, making decisions, and critically evaluating your opponent’s evidence and arguments. If you have to spend precious preparation time creating your response to an argument, you won’t have time to do the higher-level work that can make the difference between a win and a loss.

Read more.

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Maggie Berthiaume has an excellent post over at debatecoaches.org on getting the most out of debate camp.

This is the time of year that coaches and students start thinking seriously about camps. Instructors are gearing up for the summer, while students are day-dreaming of camp while procrastinating studying for finals. This year in particular, economic concerns make debate institute a stretch for many families. For the students who are lucky enough to be able to attend camp, being able to make the most of the experience becomes all the more important. In this regard, I offer five suggestions for making the most of debate institute. Although most of my examples will be policy-specific, I hope the general advice is useful for LD, PF or IE camp attendees as well.

#1 - Budgeting Time

You are generally on a college campus with far too many fun things to do - ultimate frisbee beckons. It may seem very enticing to spend most of your time hanging out with your friends, but if you do, you will likely leave camp with far less developed skills than you would otherwise have. At the same time, it would be insane of me to suggest that you spend all of your time in the library and be a social pariah. Instead, I suggest a 2:1 ratio of work to play. The most important part of this is that when you are working, you are actually working. Hint: it’s not debate work if you have Lexis open in the background of your Facebook chats. If you actually spend focused time researching and developing your debate skills, you will have ample time to make new friends. If you spend your working time actually talking to the person next to you, you will have less time to play later.

#2 - Assignment Quality

For whatever reason, I always seem to have a few people in my lab who want the assignments that their coaches will never let them read in a debate. While I’m sure they have fun researching these issues, the files go into a tub somewhere never to be seen again in a debate. When you are at camp, a major goal of your research should be to consider what work you can do over the summer to shape the course of the topic(s). That is, niche files are interesting, but may ultimately be less educational than the large topic file or affirmative. When your lab leader is assigning research, ask yourself, “Is this something I can see myself reading in January?” If so, go for it. If your thought is, “No but this is such an awesome one-trick pony to beat the kid in the other lab,” you might want to consider taking the longer view.

Read more.

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Roy Lefkovitz has a great article over at the 3nr.com on becoming the 2NC:

"I recently switched speaker positions to the 2N. I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on what you think is a solid strategy to approach the many choices a 2N has to make concerning what arguments to go for (both in the block and in the 2NR). I have had only one semester experience, but find myself always second guessing and wishing I went a different route in the block and 2NR.”

Thanks for the question.  I think ALL 2ns definitely have this issue.  Part of your question shows a basic flaw in the ways 2ns think.  You ask about the block and the 2nr, but what about the 1nc.  My big point with my kids is this “Do you have winnable options.”  A lot of the negative problems stems from constructing poor 1ncs which either make the strategy very apparent to the other team or just limit your options in general.

For example if you have in the 1nc T, generic K, states, politics and business confidence and little or no case, a smart 2ac should realize that biz con isn’t a net benefit to the CP and that since you have little or no case args you can’t go for the biz con da and win.  This makes the block significantly harder because now they’ve spent more time on the other potential worlds etc etc.

Tip 1- make sure you have a couple of viable worlds in the 1nc for the block to collapse down too and that they make sense.  Investing time in the case is always good, it makes a DA and Case viable, it also makes it easier to defeat solvency deficits to counterplans if you can minimize what it is the aff actually solves for.

Tip 2- Re-evaluate during and right after the 2ac what is viable and what isn’t.  Did they just make 40 args on politics?  Well maybe we aren’t going for politics.  Make sure your block keeps the same mindset as in the 1nc.  Does what I’m extending serve some utility.  Will it scare the 1ar?  Will it get a good time tradeoff?   Does it work as a strategy in general.  This is really situational but you need to ask yourself what kind of block and 2nr do I need to give for us to win the debate.  Is this 1ar so fast that if I collapse to just states and politics they’ll make the 2nr hell for me?  Or are my cards on this stuff just so so, which means I need to make the block big to deflect attention from that?  Conversely you could decide your best chance of winning is to lock it down on an issue and make the whole block the K.  You have a good idea of who you’re debating and what you’re up against.   Assume you also aren’t going to fully cover because no 2nc has ever taken up 4-5 sheets of paper and actually covered well.

Read the rest of the article.

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Over at the3nr.com, Roy Levkowitz has more tipes for summer preparation:

For most of you all the debate season has come to its conclusion and with school winding down (or completed for seniors) you all have an abundance of free time on your hands.   While taking a break is definitely important to keep you sane and avoid burning out from debate, this time off can also be used to refine your debate skills.

A basis for this post comes from an email Naveen Ramachandrappa sent me before my junior year of college.  For those of you who don’t know who Naveen is, as a debater he was basically everything that was great about this activity.  He debated for UGA, was the hardest working debater I have ever met and was meticulous about how and what he did.  He produced this debate.uga.edu/research_guide/howto.pdf which is a PDF outlining how to create a debate template a must for cutting cards if you don’t already have one.

Read the rest of the article here.

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by Jason Wright

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Maggie Berthiaume has an excellent article on Debatecoaches.org on research tips and tricks:

One thing I tend to do in the spring is go through the tips and tricks I picked up over the course of the year. This compilation of electronic research advice and tools is certainly not comprehensive, but I hope it makes your research a little easier.

Zotero - I’ve used this for about a year now and it’s still one of my favorites. This is a firefox addon that organizes cites and allows you to save articles. I use this in two ways - (1) to put articles I encounter but don’t have time to read at the moment into the “hopper” - they will still be there three months later when I need that card, (2) to save articles before I get on the plane or head to some other internet-free location. Yes, there are other ways to do this, but this is the best I’ve found for rapid saving as I troll through articles. You just click the Zotero save button and it saves the full text of that article (and its formatting!) for offline viewing.

Read the rest of the article here.

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Throughout the course of the year you may need to research a new affirmative case that you do not have evidence on. Similarly, at institute you may be asked to research a particular affirmative from ground zero you have no information or any knowledge of the particular affirmative beyond what you have heard in the 1AC. If you find yourself in that situation, I suggest that you follow these steps in order to find some strong negative case evidence. 

The first thing you should do when researching a new affirmative is to read all of the affirmative's primary sources. To do this, you will need to get their cites. The best time to get cites is at the debate tournament. Write the cites down after the round. Do not wait until you get home. When reading through the affirmative sources, there are a number of things that you should be looking for.

One, you should look for the solution to the harm area that the primary affirmative authors actually advocate. Although all of the affirmative authors may agree that something should be done about a particular problem, it is very unlikely that they all agree that the same policy should be adopted. These potential solvency alternatives all provide excellent counterplan ground for the negative. It is very persuasive to argue that the judge should vote for the proposal that the main affirmative author actually advocates! Even if the negative is only able to find a couple of arguments as to why the particular plan should be adopted, these arguments will be excellent net-benefits to a counterplan that will likely solve the whole case. You will also want to explore the feasibility of alternative solvency proposals in case the affirmative decides to change their solvency mechanism.

Two, you should pay close attention to the footnotes that appear in the affirmative articles. Often, the authors of the affirmative articles will construct "straw man" arguments that they then go on to refute. For example, that author may say, "Some people believe that there is no chance that increasing foreign aid will improve health care. This is incorrect because..." To read this straw man argument against the affirmative would be unethical since the author actually concludes the other way. But, usually the affirmative author will cite the author who supports the straw man claim that increasing foreign aid will not improve health care. You should track this article down and read it.

Three, you should look in the affirmative sources for all of their answers to the arguments that you are going to make. If you want to rely on multiculturalism turns to answer the affirmative advantage, you know what at least some of their answers will be because they will appear in the article that was just quoted. If you don't think that you can beat their answers, you should not rely on the argument to beat that advantage.

Four, you should make a self-evaluation of the claims that are being made by the affirmative authors. Are there any reasons you think these claims simply aren't true? You should incorporate these logical arguments into your case attack. Moreover, chances are that the reason you have grounds to disagree with the author is because you know of arguments which exist in other literature that will refute his or her claims potentially even in your own files! Often, you will be able to make arguments against the affirmative based on their footnotes, or lack thereof. If there is no footnote in the REUTERS article that claims that an economic decline will cause World War III, you should argue that the claim in the card is unwarranted.

Five, when you read through the affirmative sources you should look for any qualifiers the author places on his or her claim. Although authors may very well conclude that the affirmative impact scenario is possible, they may very well not believe that it is probable. This should help the negative develop risk assessment criteria.

Six, you should look for links to disadvantages. While it may be easy to look for links to disadvantages that you already possess, you should also look for links to disadvantages that you do not yet have. You should do this by first fully exploring the reasons that the plan has not been adopted in the status quo. More often than not, there are good, logical reasons that the affirmative plan has not been adopted. You should explore all of these reasons as potential options for negative strategies and locate articles by those individuals who support maintenance of the status quo. You should also look for claims that the author makes regarding the benefits of the plan's adoption. The author may claim that a proposed plan will cause economic growth, for example. Although he or she may assume that economic growth is good, you can easily argue that it is bad. Since the affirmative may not claim this advantage, you should cut the link evidence.

Seven, when you actually go to the library to look for the affirmative sources that are from top-rate journals, you should always look a couple of issues ahead into the journal to see if any responses were written to the articles. Often, new and controversial ideas that are proposed in particular issues of journals invite responses that appear in subsequent issues. These articles provide not only an excellent chunk of negative evidence, but you can look for additional articles written by those respondent authors for more negative evidence.

So far I have only discussed what to do with the affirmative articles when you find them. As you can see, just reading the affirmative articles alone and locating the footnotes can provide an ample amount of evidence from which to construct a negative strategy. Additional library research, however, will only benefit you by increasing the number of potential options for your negative strategy. The following are some suggestions for approaching additional library research.

First, you should look up the names of the affirmative authors and the negative authors you have found in the affirmative footnotes in the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI). You should find additional articles by all of these authors and probably cites for articles written in response to each of them.

Second, you should concentrate on sources that were written after the affirmative's articles. If the affirmative authors are actually scholars, they will have reviewed the literature that was written about the topic area prior to introducing their particular proposal.

Third, stick to high quality sources. If the affirmative sources are terrible, victory should be easy if your sources are of high quality. If the affirmative sources are excellent, bad negative evidence will do you little good.

Fourth, be prepared to develop more than one negative strategy. If you have researched well, you should find that you have too many cards to read in any single debate and that many of the positions that you could run potentially contradict. Developing many negative strategies will allow you always to have a new strategy of your own prepared.

Fifth, don't cut too many cards. One of the advantages of debating in the information age is that debate teaches you to manage vast quantities of information; you should be able to choose among all available information for the best arguments. Once you have enough evidence to support each of the arguments, only cut additional cards if those cards are better than the ones you already have or if they say something different than what the previously acquired cards already say.

Researching against a new affirmative case can be an exciting and stimulating exercise. Although some teams dread the prospect of debating on the negative, a well-researched and organized negative team should be able to control the debate by forcing the affirmative to debate the weak spot in their literature .

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8 Easy Ways to Improve Research Efficiency

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By Jason Wright

Many younger debaters (and some experienced ones) struggle with research efficiency. By that I mean that they spend a very long time doing research and end up with either a low number of cards or a bunch of cards that are all not very good. Top debate coaches and researchers tend to be able to crank out files much faster than students, but improving your own research efficiency actually isn’t too difficult. Here are some suggestions:

1. Use a diversity of resources. Debaters who focus on one single resource like Google or Lexis often get stuck after a while scrolling through results pages and find little that is useful. This is because the marginal value of each search hit decreases the deeper you look through a database. For this reason, you should start each internet session by opening up tabs for a bunch of different places where you plan on searching, and periodically switch between websites. This will also give you the highest quality cards since the best articles aren’t all concentrated in one database.

2. Use footnotes, references, and hyperlinks. This is one you’ve probably heard in debate camp, but it’s worth trying. Authors will include links to other source material that is generally as useful if not more useful than the article you’re reading. This is because authors often skim a portion of an argument to make a point, while leaving behind tons of other relevant information. This technique also gives you links to articles that are sorted much better than any search engine, because someone who actually read and wrote about each document has compiled the list.

3. Search for articles, not for arguments. The best way to get a lot of cards on a lot of different parts of a topic is to find large, lengthy articles. Debaters often get into the mindset of “oh, my disad is missing a link, I’ll just run a google search for ’space-based solar power causes backlash from china and russia’” and then spend hours searching before they find an article that makes that argument. If you search for a more general article about the topic, even if you don’t immediately run into the article that makes the argument you’re looking for you’ll gain tons more cards in the process. If you are still missing critical parts of file at the end, go back and fill those in afterward. Along those lines…

4. Use books. This is not always feasible, especially at tournaments and in towns with poor library systems. Yet debate research from books is how the best files are created and where the best cards come from. It also saves a ton of time because you can just read through the book and pull out useful passages rather than spend a bunch of intermediate time clicking between articles and waiting for websites to load.

5. Find relevant and specific places to search. If you find an interesting article on the website of some think tank or publication, it may be worthwhile to check out the rest of that website even if the article itself doesn’t link to it. For example, if you are doing prolif research, it is much more productive to search on websites like the Arms Control Association, Federation of American Scientists, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the IAEA website than some generic search engine.

6. Have the debate round in mind. None of the articles you read will accurately prioritize the arguments you need in a debate, so set a reasonable limit on the number of cards you cut on each subset of an argument. Going back to the prolif example, it is easy to find a ton of cards that say CTBT good, but they generally assume that the treaty has entered in force, and it is more likely you will lose a CTBT debate on the argument that US ratification doesn’t guarantee entry into force. This shouldn’t be interpreted as a violation to rule #3, but you should keep general concepts about where you need to research most in mind as you search for articles.

7. Leave formatting until the end. This is especially true when you are doing debate work between rounds at a tournament. It is a waste of time to format each card exactly to your template and underline right after you cut each card. You are going to highlight the cards anyway if you discover you need the file tomorrow morning, so why not wait until then and spend the time working on additional files? In general, you should only organize the cards as much as you think you will need to quickly and easily find each one when you use the file. (Also, organization and underlining can be done by freshmen.)

8. Don’t get distracted. Close Facebook, AIM, or whatever tends to distract you most. If you focus and start your research with those things out of sight, you’re less likely to turn to them than if they are constantly open.

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by Jason Wright

If you don’t think that cross-x is useful or worthwhile, there are an infinite number of coaches and debaters out there who will tell you you’re wrong. Rounds can be won or lost in the cross-x alone for many reasons, and the best cross-xers can force teams to kick positions or just straight-up embarrass them in 3 minutes. That is undeniably a powerful tool.

Here are some tips to make better use of your cross-x time:

1. Prepare in advance. Don’t just wait until they finish speaking and then shuffle through their cards to try to find something that doesn’t make sense - read them as they go along. Flag anything on your flow that you think may not make sense. Look out for outlandish claims or cards that you think may be powertagged.

2. Don’t just focus on evidence. The WORST cross-xes are those that are entirely about debating some line in some card that the judge can’t even see. It can be effective to question the validity of evidence, but there are 3 important guidelines you should follow when doing so: a) Only if the evidence is important to both their argument and the argument you are about to make in the next speech b) Only if there is something clearly wrong with the evidence - such as it being entirely out of context, from some whackjob source, etc. c) Don’t beat the issue into the ground - touch on a card but don’t spend more than 20 seconds on one particular card. If your opponent is clearly lying, give your interpretation of the card in your speech Your goal should be the question the validity of arguments, not just the evidence in support of arguments.

3. Be efficient. Don’t ask question that takes you more than about 10-15 seconds to say. Don’t spend more than a minute on any specific issue. If your opponent is being longwinded, you must take control and cut them off. You have more to cover than you think.

4. Every question has a purpose. If you are asking questions to waste time, you haven’t adequately prepared for cross-x. You should always ask questions to either damage your opponent’s credibility on an issue or to set up arguments or strategies for later on.

5. Employ techniques. Debate veterans will always have a favorite c-x technique to share, ask around. Here are some ideas to get you thinking strategically: - “Pit of doom”: Ask your opponent to make a choice between two options and word them such that the “right” answer sounds really stupid. - Setting up a question: Instead of asking a direct question that would force your opponent to admit something, ask a series of questions with more acceptable answers that lead to one inescapable conclusion. - Open-ended question at the end: Right at the end of cross-x, ask a really vague, open-ended question like “explain your K link story.” Then sit down. It wastes their prep and generally won’t do much for your opponent.

6. Try some method acting. At times you will want to entirely change your cross-x persona to match a strategy. Sometimes you will want to grandstand and intimidate, other times you want to ask dumb, obvious questions to set up a point. As a case example, in HS I used a CP strategy that required teams to admit in 1AC CX that they fiated their plan permanently and indefinitely into the future. The technique I used for this was to play dumb and ask stupid questions like “Well what if tomorrow the President decided he didn’t like your plan? Couldn’t he just overturn it?” Teams obviously wouldn’t answer yes, and they will generally seize on the opportunity to get indignant about how awesome fiat is. I got the answer I wanted every time I used this strategy.

7. Get your status questions out of the way. Seriously, do it at the very beginning of cross-x. Forgetting until prep time, being reminded by your partner, and waiting until the end just verify that your theory attacks aren’t credible.

8. Build rapport. Cross-x is your time to show personality, intelligence, wittiness, etc. Stand up, speak clearly and with purpose. One technique I always used to use was to act like the judge (if I knew them well enough). Display a character and tone that your judge can understand and respect. It’s more important than any other speech you can give.

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