HomeSchoolDebate

[Sk8erboy]

Written by Nicholas Ducote, to be published by Communicators For Christ in their upcoming Evidence Guide.

Writing and Organizing Your “Brief”
Nicholas Ducote

Imagine a debate round as an auction for the judge’s vote. As a prospective judge-buyer, you have a very different form of currency: persuasive skills, clothing, demeanor, humor, and evidence. Every year, new debaters (and even a few seasoned debaters) ask what the best way to organize their evidence might be. The answer is always the same – a brief. So, what is a brief?
A brief is a collection of ideas or responses designed to communicate a position. The purpose of a brief is two-fold. It is an aid in both preparation and organization. First, preparation – outside of the round, writing briefs will help you gain a greater understanding of the issues being researched. By doing research on many specific issues and preparing a comprehensive response to ideas, the debater will have a better grasp of those issues and can more adequately approach the issue in-round. Second, organization – once the round begins, it’s easy to lose track of what has been said or even what should be said next. Hindsight won’t win rounds. Enter the brief. When a debater has a prepared brief, he will be much more coherent in-round and have a better round.
Creating this tool of preparation and organization is a feat in and of itself. Each unique idea you have will translate into a plethora of research and articles on the idea. Taking those entire articles into the round is both bulky and impractical. For this reason, it is best to “cut” or “block” the articles as they are researched. Blocking is a pretty simple task, really. First, open up a word processor (Microsoft Word, Notepad, Wordpad, WordPerfect, OpenOffice, etc.) First, select the relevant material, copy it (ctrl+c) then paste it (ctrl+v) into the word processor (this function is a debater’s best friend). This is the beginning of a block– specifically, the “quote” portion. Put some quotation marks around that baby and it’s good to go. The next two steps can be done in any order. The evidence must be tagged and cited. Tagging is when you summarize the evidence with a few key words. This “tag” is placed above the quote and generally bolded. The last piece of information is the citation. The citation is normally italicized and includes: the author (with his/her credentials), the “Article title,” Publication, and date of publication. The finished evidence “block” or “card” would probably look something like this:
Isolationism was partly the cause of the Great Depression
Donald L. Evans (US Commerce Secretary), “Ensuring Economic Freedom in the 21st Century” remarks to the World Affairs Council of Washington, DC on March 23, 2004:
“Let’s be sure to remember the lessons of the 1920s and 1930s. While economists may differ on whether isolationism actually caused or only worsened and extended the Great Depression, there’s no doubt that protectionist policies made things a lot worse for Americans and for people around the world.”

Now that all of the relevant quotes have been cut or blocked from the article(s), it’s time to organize them (a debater would be better off committing hari-kari than bringing in 20 pages of random, unorganized evidence into a round.) The two parts of a brief are the table of contents or index and the body. For each card/piece of evidence, copy the tag and paste it into the ToC, thus creating a list of everything in that brief. (Tip: For faster indexing, start at the top of the brief and highlight the first tag, then press ctrl and highlight the next, let off ctrl, and repeat process. Once everything you want to copy is highlighted use good ol’ ctrl-c, then paste it where you want it with ctrl-v.) The body can be structured in a variety of ways; however, there are three main ways that most debaters organize their evidence.

Organizing by… Stock issue:

Affirmative Method: There are four stock issues (five if disadvantages are counted) crucial to the affirmative plan. Find evidence backing up each of those stock issues and place them in separate documents. Then when a negative team argues a particular stock issue, pull out that brief and (voila) the arguments are ready.

Negative Method: Take each piece of evidence and place it under a section for each stock issue. If there is evidence about how the affirmative team’s plan won’t work, put it under solvency. And so forth and so on for additional evidence. This is the preferred and most widely used method for negative briefs.

Organizing by… Individual argument:

Affirmative Method: It is guaranteed that the negative team will make some of the same arguments against an affirmative case each round. In order to make the refutation consistent and powerful, create a brief for each of these arguments (or any other arguments that present themselves). When an argument is made, the brief will be ready to go. This is the most effective and more common structure for affirmative briefs.

Negative Method: The best use for this structure as the negative is to make briefs on generic ideas like constitutional provisions, disadvantages, or governmental policies. There’s nothing really special to this brief. If an issue comes up regularly in many rounds, then place all the evidence about that issue in a single document for ease of use in-round.

Organizing by… Each affirmative point:

Negative Method: This type of brief would respond to each individual harm, mandate, and advantage. It would typically be used when responding only to a single case where the specific definitions, inherency, harms, mandates, solvency, and advantages are known. Not only are these type of briefs a blast to write, but they’re great for debating that one case.

Once these briefs are completed and look all beautiful, the chance will come up to trade them with fellow debaters – this helps limit the research burden on any one person as each debater might have something unique that the other needs. Sounds like a match made in Heaven. So go ahead and send them the brief and they’ll send one back. There are some ethics involved in trading briefs however:
1. Never trade another person’s brief without the author’s permission. It’s their work. If they want to benefit from the trade, that’s fine, but permission must be granted before briefs are traded.
2. Never trade copyrighted works. This would include material in sourcebooks. Doing that is illegal.
Lawyers prepare briefs, government official prepare briefs, we wear briefs, but, in a debate round, the properly constructed brief is a debater’s greatest friend. Learn to wield it like an ancient and powerful katana –fellow Samurais will bow to your prowess and humbly accept defeat.

Appendix
(the kind which doesn’t require removal)

Information placed at the top or bottom of a page (such as page numbers, names, club name, etc.) are easy to do in a word processor. It is done by using the “header/footer” function. Insert one of those on Microsoft Word by going through the following steps:

View -> Header/footer. (Note: names are nice when evidence gets mixed up on the debate table or gets loaned out to someone.)

For page numbers: Insert -> Page numbers. (Note: page numbers are helpful if evidence gets dropped or loaned out to someone and is returned out of order.)

It can be helpful to have a break in the pages between cards. Without those breaks, evidence will end up broken into two pieces (meaning shuffling between the two pages will be required when reading evidence. To insert a break: insert -> break -> page break or ctrl + return/enter.

Copyright 2006, Nicholas Ducote.
_________________
-Nick

[quote="Jason"]I'd celebrate Yom Kippur, though. Seriously. What better event is there to commemorate than a bunch of ninja-Jews infiltrating the Romans and re-consecrating the temple? Rock on, rabbis. Rock on. [/quote]