I think that this is a great public forum topic: it relates to a current event that will educate students on some of the nuanc
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Lesson 4.2 Day 3
| 13NFL1-Compulsory Voting Page 15 of 163 www.victorybriefs.com Topic Analysis by Devin Race Starting the Year Right Before I dive into the topic, I’d just like to say a few words about debating the first topic at the first tournaments of the year. You may think to yourself that you’re rusty from the summer and that everyone is going to be just getting back into the swing of things. Don’t think like that. If you have been unsatisfied with your competitive success and feel like you haven’t performed to your potential, the beginning of the year is an ideal time to breakout. Why The start of any new topic is rocky for anyone. You haven’t had many, or any, tournaments to test your cases, you haven’t had time to do that much research, and you don’t have a great idea of all the positions you need to prep against. These factors are compounded on the first topic of the year because you add to the normal new-topic jitters additional things people dealing with losing the seniors who were supporting the team, changing to anew coach, and dealing with all the normal start-of-the-school-year stuff while trying to prep for the topic. All that is to say, people probably wont be debating at their best during the month of September. You may have realized that fact passively. It may have been a comfort to you because you felt that you were scrambling and liked the knowledge that everyone else was scrambling, too. If you trade this passive attitude for an active one, you’ll leapfrog ahead at the beginning of the year. This is debate strategy on a macro level. Take advantage of everyone else’s unpreparedness rather than participating in it. You can take advantage of it by putting MORE work in for this topic than you normally do. You don’t really have homework right now and you probably get 1 or 2 dropped lowest quiz grades or something in your classes. Use them now. Doing prep is valuable because it gives you an advantage over your opponents. Your prep will give you an even greater advantage over your opponents right now because they haven’t done it. That means prep is much more valuable at this time of year and you should take advantage of that fact. Here’s an example of the prep you should be doing. You know the Harvard Law Review articles and if you didn’t before, you do now. You don’t have to wait for the first tournament to know that people are going to be running this evidence. Read through the article and cut answers or find authors indicting the methodology or just come up with responses to every part of it. Here’s a prep mistake you should avoid during this time because there is something of a time crunch, you may just sort of cast about and start writing the first case position that you can think |