How to Improve

Watching Lectures

Oftentimes in policy debate, the skill gap may not be in execution, but simply in knowledge of arguments. A debater who’s extremely proficient at counterplan competition will normally best a debater who is unfamiliar with responding to anything competition-related. 

Especially when there’ll never always be someone available to help you understand an argument through and through, lectures online will always be there to help. Core concepts like framework, competition, and case debating all have numerous tips online that could show immediate impacts on how you debate certain arguments.

The Debate Institutes at Dartmouth camp (DDI) records all lectures from previous years and posts them online on YouTube, for anyone to watch. Other debate-related channels also post lectures that may be helpful.

Drills

Debate can also be an activity that is challenging to practice on your own. Here are two core ways to improve on your own time, that many successful debaters utilize daily:

Speaking Drills

Speaking can often be an issue for most struggling debaters, as they can lead to poor RFDs and low speaker point rounds. Speaking better can also help you seem like you’re winning debates, as you look like the more experienced debater. An in depth guide is here. Here are some helpful drills that you can practice for a couple minutes at a time:

1. Over-enunciation: Try to enunciate each syllable, which can help your mouth become used to speaking in different ways.

2. Watermelon: Say “watermelon” in between each word, which can help you pronounce each word.

3. Backwards: Read your speech backwards, which can help you articulate unfamiliar syllables.

4. Speed: Go through your speech as fast as possible to help with reading as much content as possible.

Rebuttal Redos

After each round, you should always be analyzing each speech you gave, with an idea of what you could do better next time. To actualize these improvements, rebuttal redos are incredibly helpful, where you take a previously given speech and redo it after, correcting every small mistake until it’s flawless. This helps with experiencing how it feels to give perfect speeches against different arguments, which is extremely helpful in actual rounds.

Watching Rounds

An incredible, and probably the most efficient way to improve is to watch those who are exceptional policy debaters, and to emulate them in rounds. Top-achieving teams from previous years have numerous rounds recorded and posted on YouTube, where you can witness what a perfect 2NR on the Politics DA looks like, or even how to give winning 1ARs and other speeches. By trying to sound like the best, you’ll eventually become the best.

You can find many rounds on Policy Debate Central, and also on Graham Revare’s playlist of exceptional policy debates.

Coaching

If you really struggle with certain aspects of debate and feel like you need someone to talk to, coaching is always a great option. Whether it be understanding a concept that a lecture fails to clarify for you, or to even strategize against a certain team in a tournament, having an extra opinion will always be extremely helpful. One-on-one coaching can often be a highly efficient way to improve, since a strong coach can immediately point out your consistent mistakes.

However, you should always beware of high rates—many coaches aren’t cheap at all, and can be expensive for even hours at a time. Furthermore, if you do decide to get coaching, you should always make the most out of it—if there’s anything you can do for free, I’d advise you to do that first.

I hope this guide gives you an idea on how to improve for your future tournaments! Thanks!