Padding Speeches

The most common medium of padding is a legal pad. These can be bought on Amazon for cheap — between $1.50 and $2.00 a piece. Legal pads also come in a large variety of forms, each with their own benefits and drawbacks. If you’re a debater that tends to gesture with your legal pad, you might favor a thicker one that makes gesturing with that side more difficult. Depending on the color you write with, a yellow legal pad might make things easier to read compared to a white one. Point is, find a legal pad that fits your style, whatever that might be.

Once you’ve decided which legal pad to use, it’s time to start padding your speech. The first method of padding this page will go over is traditional padding.

The biggest note with traditional padding is the shortening of phrases. The goal is to make your speech easy to understand, such that even if you get lost, it’s incredibly easy to pick up where you were without looking for your exact spot. Thus, any signposting is standardized across all speeches and never written out. Instead, write an ‘I’ to mark your impact, ‘SQ’ for status quo, or ‘W’ for warrant.

Intros should be (almost) entirely memorized, so most people don’t write more than a line explaining it. For example:

McDonalds $13/hr, rep clown > serious MinWage. Econ policy ≠ laugh, affirm.

That introduction is typically around 75 words, lasting 30 seconds. But by memorizing and shortening it, you leave more room for refutations and extensions, which might not be memorized since they’re developed during the round.

Every differing type of padding style up until this point has had one thing in common: the use of a legal pad. Speeches given off of an iPad, well, don’t use a legal pad. Quite simply, they’re the most revolutionary and polarizing type of padding on the circuit.

It polarization is noted not because of a disdain for the use of iPads by competitors (most are either indifferent or in favor of such technology), but instead by local leagues and circuits. For example, the Illinois Congressional Debate Association (ICDA) outlaws debaters from using technology while speaking.

“Neither speakers nor questioners may use electronic devices while speaking or questioning.” ICDA Rule 37a

Thus, it’s incredibly important that you check with your local league rules before using an iPad to give your speech. That is, unless you’re willing to risk disqualification or forfeiture of awards.

It also can be polarizing for judges. While the vast majority of judges do not give a preference one way or another between using a legal pad or an iPad, there are a select few that may dock ranks for speaking with such technology.

This slideshow includes a compiled list of screenshots for different speeches written on an iPad.

Nick Ostheimer placed 4th at NSDA Nationals in Congressional Debate: House while using an iPad

So if there’s all these harms, why would anyone use iPads in the first place? One word: adaptation. If you want to completely re-organize your speech in the middle of a round, all you need is a few cuts, copies, and pastes and you’re there. If you have a card you want to add, you can just copy it straight from the website.

Adaptation is exceptionally easy for any online tournament when using a computer, and iPads replicate that for in-person tournaments.

Howevcr, like most things in life, there is not just one approach towards padding or shorthand or speechwriting. These are all suggestions and guides. For example, while Nicholas Ostheimer uses block format to write his speeches, Breck DuPaul writes out on Google Docs almost word for word. There are pros and cons to both of these methods so experiment and see what works well for you! 

Check out the examples below! 

Printed speeches is the other form of padding popular pre-pandemic. If you are one who likes to prepare and pad speeches days before the tournament starts, this might be the form for you. It’s incredibly fast compared to the alternative padding methods — just put some glue or tape down on your pad and attach the speech you’ve written out ahead of time. This speed is the primary benefit of printed speeches, and the main reason it’s so common with novices.

Similarly to traditional padding, you want to shorthand as much as possible. Although you can fit a word-for-word speech when printed, you should refrain from doing so such that you can find your spot when you’ve forgotten a phrase. After all, you shouldn’t be reading your speech off your legal pad. Instead, you should be able to pick it up every once and a while and figure out where you need to go quickly and without pausing… writing out every single word prevents you from doing that effectively.

Thus, all the notes about shorthand and notation are just as relevant in printed speeches as they are in traditional padding.

But if there’s so much time saved by simply printing speeches, why isn’t it so popular? It really comes down to three main reasons:

1. Memorization. You know how every teacher says “there’s been studies done, and writing notes in a notebook helps you remember content significantly more than typing them” or something like that? Well, they’re telling the truth. If you want to memorize as much of your speech as possible, writing it out instead of just typing it goes a long ways.

2. Inability to prep in-round. You can’t just exit the chamber, print a speech, and come back in without missing crucial information from a speech that you might need to extend or refute.

3. Struggle adapting your speech. This is probably the main rationale behind why printed speeches are so unpopular at the national circuit level. The whole goal with iPads and sticky notes (as this page will explain later) is to make adaptability much easier. Even with traditional padding, you can erase a line here or there without problem. With printed speeches, what’s there is there, and it’s very difficult to cross out a rehash status quo block and replace it in the margins.

In the years after the COVID-19 pandemic, sticky note padding have become arguably the single most common form of padding, especially on the national circuit. Simply, sticky note speeches attempt to replicate the adaptability of online speeches for digital tournaments with the legal pad accessibility for in-person tournaments.

Here, each section of your speech (status quo, warrant, and impact) are written on sticky notes that can be easily taken off if needed. If someone gives an impact that’s identical to yours, just peel off the sticky note and add a new blank one where you can write out a new impact. Instead of erasing large parts of your speech and being unable to fit new information into the margins, sticky notes allow for a quick-and-easy switch of any area that’s suddenly become rehash.

Same with printed speeches and traditional padding, shorthand is essential. However, there can be some subtle differences with the help of your new sticky tool. Instead of writing out ‘SQ’ to represent the status quo or ‘W’ for warrant, you can opt for different colored sticky notes that represent those blocks. Maybe blue fits well for your impact, green for the status quo, and yellow for the warrant. Just make sure the colors can be easily differentiated and that your writing is clear as day (don’t use blue pen on a blue sticky note).

As for drawbacks, the main one is time. Simply put, padding with sticky notes takes substantially more time than printing that same speech or just using an iPad. It’s even slower than traditional padding, which is why the old style is still the defacto method for anyone who needs to pad in-round. So while sticky note padding prevents you from needing to start your speech from scratch, it’s not the preferred method of preparation in the rare event that you do need to.

But sticky notes also have cool benefits for speeches, even if they’re padded traditionally or printed. Specifically, they can be used to add to the margins with refutation or extensions. This is especially helpful if you want to re-use the same speech multiple times in a season, but remove the round-specific refutations that get added in after a tournament.