Debatable.

thank you all for appreciating my two years of debate memes! 

i’m a high school senior this year, and i have debated my last tournament.

we’re not going to the toc, which i kind of regret, but now it’s too late to prep & we already withdrew our spot,,

and i’m not sure what this means for this account ! i’ll be joining brown university’s parliamentary debate team next year, but i know that college debate is pretty different compared to high school debate. (’: 

lawful good: “is everyone ready?”

neutral good: “their case, our case.”

chaotic good: *fumbles with beeping timer*

lawful neutral: “i’ll just be going down my opponents’ case.”

true neutral: THERE IS NO TRUE NEuTRAL IN DEBATE

chaotic neutral: *starts speech before anyone is ready*

lawful evil: “is anybody not ready?”

neutral evil: “judge ready? partner ready? opponents ready? timekeeper ready?” 

sorry for the late response – i’ve been at tournaments over the weekends and leaving/coming back home during the weekdays when the lighting is still bad before the sunrise. (and picture quality matters 😤)

here are some tips for flowing:

-use one pen color for your side and one pen color for your opponents side

-flow on two sheets of paper lol

-choose one color for the affirmation and one for the negation. this way, when you’re debating in outrounds near midnight with a frazzled brain, you won’t get confused over which side you are (trust me – this happens more often than you’d expect)

-create a shorthand for commonly used words! i use ! for “impact,” a circle with a line through it for “can’t,” and a triangle for “change,” for example.

-i would also familiarize myself with common vocab from each new topic so that i could abbreviate. for example, “PC” takes a lot less time to write compared to “price controls”

-if you’re second speaker like me and need to reference both your flow and laptop for cards, i write a bracket symbol “[-]” to indicate to myself when i should switch from looking at he flow to reading evidence.

-circle parts in your opponents’ case that seem weak, confusing, or suspicious so that you remember to ask them about it in cross

-it’s surprising how few debaters do this, but flow your partner’s speech!! you need to mirror each other in what you go for in the round, and it’s hard to do that if you don’t write down what they say

-when your opponents bring up the same point in a late speech, just use an arrow to bring the prior idea further on the flow – there’s no need to rewrite the ideas

-distinguish cards from ideas by squaring or bracketing the names

here’s the flows of a round i watched this october. they’re kinda messy, but i hope it’s at least somewhat helpful! :^)

i started off debating in the local utah circuit, which is known for neither great debate teams nor great judges. we’ve been shifting to the national circuit for the past two years though. this year alongside some local tournaments, we’ve gone to long beach, apple valley, and glenbrooks, which are certainly different compared to utah tournaments. (we just went to alta, a local bid tournament, which was like a flashback to utah circuit debate lol)

me: 

please send help. if anyone is willing to trade prep for public forum db8 (i’ll have things by tomorrow i swear) please message me :’)) this is my first time going to the TOC but i’ve been so embroiled in school stuff that i’m n o t ready.