On (the) Comparative

"The comparative in this debate is..." "On the comparative...." "You need to be more comparative..."

What is comparative? It is "comparing" two or more different things and saying which is better. Simple enough right? But it's a surprisingly important part of debating. 

It is very easy to give the judges simply a long list of good things and bad things without saying which I should care about more. On very simple things (e.g. there will be more dead people) it is okay to let the judges do this themselves, but the more complex arguments you make the more you need to say what is important and why. 

This is also where impacting comes in, translating a harm into obvious real world terms. Random example, if you tell me X will result in disillusionment with state institutions, that sounds vaguely bad. But I'm not very sure how much I care, but if you tell me that because people are disillusioned with the state they won't report crimes to the police, they will turn to vigilante justice, and that will cause bad things, I now know why I care.

Comparative then is taking the impacts of two different points, or of the opposing sides of the debate and saying which is more important. Example: "Even if we buy their analysis, their only harm is that a small number of people will be upset because of an abstract violation of their bodily autonomy, compare that to the harms we bring you of mass death if people are not vaccinated." 

CC - Flickr user Infobunny

Things vary in importance depending on the framework you judge them in, which will depend on the debate. If you ask me which is better, chalk or cheese I can't answer (and may think you are crazy), but if you tell me that we are trying to make pizza, the answer is obvious. Similarly you may sometimes need to put things in more of a context or framing than just our default assumptions about what things are bad. For example, if you can make me believe that the most important thing in this debate is the impact on the poor, (for reasons a, b, and c) then I will judge the arguments in the debate based on their effect on that.

Another way in which a point can be "non-comparative" is if it is true, but it is true on both sides of the debate, so it doesn't matter. Example: "They say that our policy will economically coerce people, but people aren't making a free choice in the status quo anyway so that point is non-comparative." If you explain why the form of coercion on their side is more harmful, or affects more people, or whatever it is then comparative. 

Comparative is essential in a summary speech, where you are explicitly telling the judges why point X beats point Y and why. But it is also important to do in every speech. Its also an element of judging, deciding what is important in the debate, but if you do that yourself you can ensure that the judges think your stuff is the most important. 

Roles on the table in British Parliamentary Debating

This post list the very basic requirements for each role on the table, more advanced articles are on the way but I thought it would be useful to have this to start with as a reference/index.

With thanks to Mark Haughton for the pretty diagram

Judging Competitive Debating - Part 3 - Chairing

This is part of my series of introductory articles, which explain the basics of competitive debating and follows on from "Judging competitive debating - Part 1 - A general framework" and "Judging Competitive Debating - Part 2 - The process of judging."

Pictures chairs when discussing how to chair?
Wow. So hilarious. Very original.
CC Wikimedia commons

Chairing is one of the odder roles in competitive debating, on good days it takes practically no work, but it can also be incredibly difficult.

In theory, the chair is responsible for keeping the debate running smoothly, dealing with any issues that arise and running the judging discussion in such a way that the correct call is made. In practice the actual chairing of the debate is a fairly minor part at an actual competition, as speakers know what order to go up in, and issues of keeping order rarely happen.

Conducting the judging discussion is more difficult, not everyone who is an amazing judge is an equally good chair as it requires not just coming to the correct call and understanding the debate, but requires interpersonal skills for managing the discussion and dealing with disagreements. 

Chairing is a difficult and responsible role, so its perfectly natural to be nervous when doing it for the first time, just like when speaking. Just remember to work through the substance of the decision and not be intimidated.

This is harder to make strict rules on than some of the other stuff I've written about, as it varies from debate to debate, but I've tried to give some general guidelines. If you want to learn to chair in more detail the best way is to watch and imitate experienced chairs in how they run the discussion and ask them questions.

Judging Competitive Debating - Part 2 - The process of judging

This is part of my series of introductory articles, which explain the basics of competitive debating and follows on from "Judging competitive debating - Part 1 - A general framework."

Note taking 

Not massively relevant, but I couldn't resist.
- Creative Commons, Photopin. 

The first thing to say is that while you are watching a debate you should take notes of what the speakers are saying so you can refer back to them later, and to make comments to yourself (e.g. “good structure”, “have they responded to previous speaker?”).

Notes should be concise and clear as possible as you’ll have to refer to them quickly during adjudication. You don’t need to write down literally everything a speaker says (and given how fast they often speak that may be impossible) but you should try to include the important points of analysis and engagement.

The standard way to do this is to take a sheet of A4 paper and fold it in half or quarters, with each speaker in the appropriate place. Multiple colours of pen can help for distinguishing speakers, comments and POIs, and it can be useful to highlight important bits. I tend to use blue and black for the different teams (so will write a blue POI in a black speech) and red pen for comments.

Recently I’ve started taking notes on a laptop because my handwriting is terrible and slow (dyspraxia yay). This is fairly unusual but seems to be becoming more common (and I think may be more common in the US). I’ve made templates for judging which I use, which divide the page in quarters, one plain and one in colour (if they are cut off on the side of the screen switch to "web view" rather than "print view"). I then add comments, POIs, etc using bold, italics and underlining.

However amazing your memory is you really need to take good notes, as you should be able to supply evidence for your conclusions during the discussion, without notes everything tends to blur together, and you will be more likely to confuse what particular speakers said.

You should hang on to your notes after a debate so that if speakers ask you for personal feedback between rounds, or at the social in the evening. Though as a general rule I’d say not to share your notes with speakers as they should contain your unfiltered opinions on a debate, and you may self censor if you think people will read them.


Judging discussion

After the debate has finished and all the speakers have been herded out the room, the judges will have about 15 minutes to discuss the debate, come to a call and assign speaker points. This discussion will be moderated and structured by the chair, generally the most experienced judge on the panel. Given that time is tight, and if judging runs over the whole tournament can be delayed (resulting in rage and violence from the conveners, and getting food/drink late) you should try and present your opinion of the debate in a clear and concise way and focus on relevant parts of the debate.

Judging competitive debating - Part 1 - A general framework

This is part of a series of introductory articles. Which explain basic concepts of competitive debating. It is followed by "Judging Competitive Debating - Part 2 - The process of judging."

I am indebted to the wonderful David Bender for the first part of this explanation, I was going to write one myself but his is sufficiently good and concise that would seem like a waste of time:

CC - Photopin

[Judging] is a 'comparative assessment of each team's persuasiveness'. 

It's comparative, insofar as you compare teams: there is no absolute standard of persuasiveness a team has to beat. 

It's team-based, insofar as you have to judge the whole team. 

We know that three things make a speech persuasive: content, analysis and style. If a speech contains all three of those things, it is persuasive. 

Content means attempting to prove things relevant to your side winning. You can choose content - so pick what path you want to take to proving your side. However, other teams can challenge you to provide content: 'demonstrate this is legitimate'. Look to see what metrics teams set themselves, and what metrics are set by other teams. 

Analysis means explanation. Specifically, an idea is well analysed if teams explain why it is true, and why it is important. Analysis can be thick or thin. Thick analysis is well explained with each logical step explicated. Thin analysis is poorly explained with many missing steps. Analysis can be broad or narrow. Broad analysis contains many independent logical chains to prove a claim. Narrow analysis contains just one. Broad, thick analysis is most persuasive. 

Style means you can understand what they say. If what they said is confusing, it cannot be credited. 

If a speech fulfills its relevant burdens, in a well analysed and stylistically clear manner, more so than other teams, that team wins. 

This framework works well for most university level competitions, but might be harder to apply in novice and schools competitions where arguments may not be made as clearly and may not explicitly clash with each other. (I’ll probably write a more detailed post on this in the future).


A few additional notes:

Points of information – Definition and tactics

This is part of a series of introductory articles. Where I try to explain basic concepts of competitive debating.

What points of information are

A “Point of Information” (POI) is when a speaker on the opposite side of the table offers a short contribution to a speech, normally consisting of a question or comment of around 15 seconds duration. Points of information are one of the things that makes British Parliamentary debating more interesting and dynamic as a format, as it allows speakers to engage with one another's arguments throughout the debate, not just during their own speeches. 

These are distinct from Points of clarification, which are specifically for during a speech from first proposition where they are outlining their definition and mechanism. The purpose of which is to clarify the mechanism that is being set out so that the debate can go smoothly for everyone. It is generally accepted that people should accept points of clarification when offered in order to make sure their position is clear and the debate goes well for everyone. Attempting to use points of clarification as a cover for points of information is considered extremely bad form.

Offering points of information

In order to offer a point of information you should stand up and/or raise your hand and say something like “Point of information,” “Madam,” “On that point,” “On that,” etc.

Note that you are not allowed to say “On economic instability” or something similar. This is known as 'headlining' and is considered an illegitimate way to insert your own points into an opponents speech without their consent.

Please maintain a level of politeness at all times when offering your point. You are asking a speaker for their permission to take time out of their speech to make a contribution and they are entirely within their rights to accept and refuse on their own whims. Offering POIs aggressively or excessively often in order to force a speaker to take you or to put them off of their speech is not allowed. A good general rule is to wait 15 seconds between offering POIs.

In order to make POIs as effective as possible I recommend preparing them beforehand in the same manner you would for a point in your own speech. It is also useful to share them with your partner (either by whispering or writing them down) so that you can decide on the most important point for you to make at that point in the debate and

Knowledge Basics - Learning for debating and how to win when you know nothing

This is part of a series of introductory articles. Where I try to explain basic concepts of debating.

This post is based on some of my teaching notes and aims to briefly introduce the basic usage of knowledge in competitive debating.

The first thing is try to know stuff.
Read broadly about current issues, so that you have a general understanding of topics that are likely to come up in debates and the general state of the world (this is probably good in an abstract engaged citizen sense, but winning debates adds some self interest).

CC attribution Michael Casey

You are not looking for 'facts.'

I often say that facts don't win debate but that's a simplification. The ability to quote the GDP of Angola on demand, while impressive, won't win you a debate.There a few things you need a basic understanding of to do debates about them, e.g. in debates about the EU its useful to know the distinctions between the EU, the European Convention on human rights, etc.

In general what you should be looking for are general concepts and arguments you can extract from articles about a specific topic and apply to a lot of different debates. For example if I'm reading an article about Zimbabwe, I am unlikely to get a debate specifically from that, but I can look at things like how a dictator retains power, refugee crises, etc. which I can then apply to other debates. The general idea is to be able to make plausible stories and characterisations of how people and countries will behave in particular situations.

Examples can be useful as a way of illustrating a point, but don't depend on them. People often use them in place of an argument, without analysing the general point or explaining how its relevant to the particular debate you are having.

What is analysis?

This is part of a series of introductory articles. Where I try to explain basic concepts of debating.

“More analysis” has become a bit of a cliché in giving debating feedback, but its almost always true that the team who does the most wins the debate. But what actually is it?

At its simplest, analysis is “telling the judges why what you say is true.” 

The opposite is an assertion. So if I say that “If we do this people will be happier” that's an assertion. If I say “When we do this it will cause A, A will cause B because of C, […...] and then X will happen which will make people happy because Z.” See what I mean?

Metaphors I find useful are building links in a chain, or piling bricks on top of each other. A lego house made of small bricks connected together and reinforcing one another is going to be stronger than a loose pile. 


Saying more words, or saying longer words, isn't the same thing as analysis. 

Explaining something in a roundabout rambling way that doesn't actually include the important content of what you are saying. Just because you've talked about something for four minutes doesn't meant you have actually explained what it is in any level of detail. "A then B then C" is different from "A! C! !B Z! A!"

Long and technical words may make you sound clever, but they don't actually make what you are saying any better unless they are explained or bring something extra with them. "The economically disenfranchised are systematically excluded from the political discourse" doesn't actually tell me anything more than "poor people don't have much power in politics."


Strategically deploying analysis 

Now you obviously don't need to do a huge amount of analysis for every claim you make, you can probably get away with saying “water is wet” or “death is bad” without much explanation. And in the limited amount of time you have to speak you need to strategically decide which of your points need to be analysed more. So you focus your time on points the other side are likely to oppose.

So your opponent will be more likely to question a point that is important to the debate (e.g. free speech is an inherent right). This also means that a point that doesn't need analysis in some debates will need a lot in others, so in a debate on military intervention people are unlikely to question that death is bad, but in one on bioethics they might say it either isn't bad in itself or less bad than other things.

On the flip side, if I spend half my speech proving in detail that "Democracy is good" and my opponent doesn't contest that, but contests how well my method achieves democracy then my analysis won't really help me win.


Proving importance

With any point the two things you need to prove to the judges are: 
1) Why is this true 
2) Why is this important. 
(Though admittedly the boundary between them is often fuzzy).

We've already talked about proving why something is true, and proving why it is important works the same way. Often its easier to prove importance than truth since its often more intuitively obvious, ("X will cause a civil war" is a difficult thing to prove, "civil war is bad" is easier). You may also have to prove why something is more important than another thing, which is normally called "Comparative" but that needs a separate article.

This is a very basic introduction, but I think it gets the important ideas across, if you want a more philosophical look at analysis I suggest the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.  

As always feel free to comment and complain below. 

Thanks to everyone who gave feedback on this article, particularly the Communist Case File members with whom I had a very productive discussion. 

In the interests of Journalistic integrity I must make a confession: The image above which I had previously implied was a Lego house is actually composed of Duplo the larger blocks intended for infants. I hope the world can forgive me.

Attending a Debating Competition

This is a followup to my previous article "What do you need to bring to a debating competition?" and part of a series of introductory articles.

First you have to find the venue. This is most likely a large generic university building and should be listed on the facebook event. Google maps and a knowledge of astronomy may be helpful for this stage.

A generic university building

When you arrive you will be need to register. There will likely be a stressed looking person at the entrance or in the main hall with a laptop. This is simply a matter of telling them your individual and team names,  and various other details such as: 

• Second language status - Some competitions have separate tabs and/or finals for speakers for whom English isn't their first language, to take into account the extra level of difficulty this causes.
• Novice status - Similar to the above, generally defined as anyone in their first year of university debating who has not broken at any tournament. 
• Clashes - This is particularly important if you are judging but may also be important for teams. So you list institutions or people you would be uncomfortable judging or being judged by, or that someone might reasonably expect you to be biased about. (E.g. institutions you have attended, former or present romantic partners, people you have spoken with, etc.)
• Dietary requirements - If they are providing food (E.g. vegetarian, religious, allergies, etc.)
• Payment -  There is normally a "reg fee" that covers the cost of running the competition, any food provided, etc. Different institutions have different rules on whether they cover it, if they provide subsidies etc. so ask at yours and ensure you know in advance what the competition will cost you.  Reg fees are usually paid in cash although bank transfer and check can be options. If you need to be reimbursed from a University or Union, it is useful to ask for a receipt.

What do you need to bring to a debating competition?

This is the first part of a planned series of basics for new debaters. Feedback is as always appreciated. 

Pens and paper 
You're going to need something to write on and with. While you can always borrow pens and paper from people this gets tiresome quickly.

I've started buying multipacks of generic multicoloured biros because I always lose them (and people 'borrow' them). A useful trick is to write in different colours for different things (e.g. black for your stuff, red for rebuttal or comments). Highlighters can also help. I like using thick marker pens to write titles so they are obvious when glancing at notes (my speaking notes tend to consist of THE TITLE OF THE POINT at the top, and indecipherable squiggles for the rest of the page).

Always use A4 if you can, flipping between  little notepad sheets is distracting for you and the judges. I quite like having a clipboard, especially when you get those annoying side tables on desks.

Time keeping
Its useful to time yourself while speaking (so you don’t suddenly realise you’re still on your first point with one minute left). Many people these days use mobile phones, with either the native stopwatch app or the super shiny Debate Keeper app, which helpfully flashes and/or goes 'bing' at the appropriate times.  Others distrust this modern witchcraft and use traditional stopwatches, which have the benefit of not running out of power or receiving calls from your cousin at inconvenient times.

Crash
In the nicest way possible, the standard of crash can be pretty minimal. Sleeping on a floor with half a dozen other snoring slightly smelly people is not unheard of, so a sleeping bag is a minimal requirement, a sleep mask and/or earplugs might be helpful if you, like me, you have trouble sleeping at the best of times.

Bring whatever you need to feel human in the morning. Minimally spare underwear and deodorant, for the benefit of others if not yourself. Basic makeup if you use it. You can bring a towel, in case you're able to get a shower, and it helps if you're washing yourself in a sink as well (also you always need to know where your towel is). The microfibre ones are particularly good.

Always pack on the side of caution if you can, trains get delayed, you might stay out later than you planned, so spare medication, makeup, clothes can be helpful. Even if you don't plan on crashing its good to have the option.

Food
While tournaments are getting better at feeding people, man cannot live on pizza alone. I swear by the supermarket sandwiches and meal deals personally. And a continuous supply of diet coke (or other caffeinated beverages) keeps me functional.

Knowledge/Case files.
I used to say that knowing things was cheating. Then I realised people who knew stuff were beating me so I amended my view slightly. Facts on their own aren't going to win you debates, but skillful deployment can make a difference. You're not going to be able to learn everything there is to know the night before a tournament, but quickly checking the current status of the various civil wars is probably useful (I wish that comment was sarcastic, but that's the world we live in now). If you know there are particular gaps in your knowledge do your best to correct them, but this will vary between people. Read the top paragraph of the relevant wikipedia pages at least, too many times have I seen things go spectacularly wrong because someone didn't know the difference between NATO and the UN. (I've also written an article on the subject.)

More experienced people often put together a case file (a bunch of printed sheets in a folder with relevant information). The ideal use of this is to be able to quickly look up useful facts in prep time ("Is Iran Sunni or Shia again?"). But this is by no means compulsory, and over focus on it may distract from more important things like actually explaining your points and winning the debate.