Verbatim and Opencaselist

Verbatim and Opencaselist

As your skills in debate widen, so should the tools at your disposal, that’s where Verbatim and Opencaselist enter the picture.

Verbatim

Verbatim is a tool created by former policy debate Aaron Hardy, and it seeks to make the process of developing and presenting cases more straightforward. It offers many convenient tools:

Card-Cutting

Verbatim integrates card cutting into its core suite of tools–with verbatim, you’re able to outline all the component parts of a card within a document which you read from debate, let’s break it down part by part.

First, you have the tagline. It summarizes the content of the card, and sits above all else, often larger and bolded. Creating a tag within verbatim is exceedingly easy, either use your own keybind for it, or select tag from the “Debate” section of Microsoft Word's ribbon. This will automatically apply the attributes of a tag to your selected text, and mark the card within word. 

Second, you have the citations. Here you’ll be able to list the author’s name and the publication date, along with any other information you deem necessary for your cite. You should list all needed information, and separately have the last name and publication year before in the cite style. Ex. Below

TAG

Last 'YY [Author; quals; Date Published; "Title"; No Publication; url; Date Of Access] 

Finally, you have the card’s text, which you should use the paste keybind for or fn + F2 for rather than ctrl v. Any text you will read out loud you can select with your cursor and highlight straight from verbatim, and use the software to also underline any otherwise relevant text. You can also emphasize any especially hard-hitting lines within verbatim, straight from the suite of Verbatim’s text options. 

View Mode

Debate may be a game, but it doesn’t need to be played blind, using verbatim’s view mode, you’re able to actually read your cards… without needing to scroll through paragraph after paragraph of unread text. By selecting the eye icon in Verbatim’s ribbon you are able to make all unread text vanish, so that within the debate, you can read what you are going to read, and slide past the rest! If an opponent calls out an unread portion of the case, you can easily reverse the view mode to see what they are fighting against!

Send-to

It sucks when you lose prep time. It sucks even more, when you’re entirely prepared, but you have to lose time because you can't get the 1AR doc out because you’re tossing around cards and trying to get them sent to your opponent. Verbatim eases this issue by allowing you to send cards to a separate doc simply by selecting the tilde (`) on your computer after selecting the tag, block, hat, or pocket you want to send in the nav bar.

Timer

While not a component of everyone’s verbatim usage, Verbatim’s timer, displayed right on your screen,  allows the debate’s time to be kept track of easily, and for the debater(s) to remain immersed in the round. Without accidentally running over… 

Opencaselist

Disclosure

Debate is not easy… that is something we can all agree on comfortably. So for novices starting out and for people wanting to prepare better for debate, access to resources is critical. That’s why disclosure, the practice of publicly releasing read cases and evidence to an online repository after your round, is such an important practice. https://opencaselist.com is the platform on which disclosure is facilitated. You debate, and then either manually, or through verbatim, you upload your position and round report to opencaselist. At first it sounds daunting, later, it becomes a muscle memory.

Scouting/Prepping

And planning, and writing, and reading cases is not terribly easy. I know I hate it! But via scouting for resources, you can easily gain access to evidence you need. If you’re missing one specific card, chances are someone else has needed it before, and all you have to do is search for the evidence to find it with ease.

Scouting is also important for pre-round preparation. By finding your opponents on the wiki, you’re able to see how they, for instance, typically respond to a K in the 1AR, and with that information you’re better able to set your blocks up for success! You can also see what cases they’ve been using for the ongoing topic cycle, and predict what they’ll run, even before you’re 30 minutes before the round.

Open Evidence Project

Research and evidence can go beyond what’s available from disclosed debates, however. With the open evidence project you can access critical projects made by debate camps and brief companies like Kankee, to gain access to already assembled cards and arguments, to use, and to block out.