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:

The morality of Debating - In Defense of Sophistry

Many people, both inside and outside the debating community feel a sort of moral unease about debating. People have remarked this when I tell them I debate, and I know debaters who are worried it has made them worse people.

This obviously doesn't come from a utilitarian judgement of the consequences of debating, but a gut feeling that there is something wrong or dishonest about arguing for things that you don't believe in and trying to make yourself as good at that as possible.

This feeling isn't confined to debating. Society feels uncomfortable about lawyers, for their willingness to manipulate facts and defend the guilty, and sales jobs are generally considered slightly sleazy.

Plato offers a POI

And this discomfort isn’t restricted to our current time and culture, it stretches back to the origins of the western intellectual tradition in ancient Greece. Plato’s dialogues[1] tell the story of our hero Socrates, the bringer of truth and logical thinking, father of Philosophy, and his greatest enemies the Sophists.

The Sophists would teach young Athenian gentlemen the dark arts of argument and rhetoric, with the intention of letting them do better in Politics and society at large (in Athens all important decisions were made by popular assembly of the citizens, so being able to speak well literally gave you the power to kill your enemies). And worst of all, for Socrates, the Sophists charged for their teaching.[2]

Socrates decried sophism as the art of making the lesser argument seem the stronger,[3] by deliberately using fallacious reasoning and rhetorical trickery, and believed it to be the enemy of truth (and therefore morality and all other nice things). To Socrates a true Philosopher (a literal lover of wisdom) should use rational argument as a method for seeking the truth of things.

In a weird way I’ve ended up being the modern equivalent of a Sophist. I teach young people how to argue for a living, seeking to make them more persuasive with no regard to truth. I even sell it to them on the basis it will allow them to bluff their way through interviews and meetings. Competitive debating makes people better and better at manipulating the truth to whatever end they are assigned. We train people to never compromise on a position, to treat an argument as about winning and losing, not the pursuit of truth.

So am I a bad person? Is everyone who engages in debating?

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.