by Patrick McDonald | Nov 30, 2023 | Lincoln-Douglas, Team Policy
Courtesy — pixabay.com Many skills are useful in debate. Among them are sounding confident, speaking smoothly, thinking well on the fly, and effectively researching a case. You can and should attempt to improve your capability in all of those areas—they are all...
by Patrick McDonald | Oct 26, 2023 | Moot Court
Courtesy — pixabay.com The first time you learned about argumentation in debate, you were likely forced to sit through a lecture on logical fallacies. In addition to ad hominem and non sequitur, you probably learned about appeals to authority. Appeals to authority are...
by Patrick McDonald | Sep 27, 2023 | Cross Examination, Lincoln-Douglas, Team Policy
Source for cover image is Pixabay.com. When I competed in the NCFCA, my cross-examination style was fairly typical: I would try to ask targeted questions about aspects of my opponent’s case that I considered relatively weak. My thought process was simply that, so long...
by Patrick McDonald | May 9, 2023 | Lincoln-Douglas, Strategy, Theory
I will begin this article with a brief disclaimer: I have no definitive answer to this quandary. The purpose of this article is not to persuade you of a response to the question in the title but instead to raise the question. It is a topic of significant importance...
by Patrick McDonald | Apr 10, 2023 | Speech Events, Strategy
As I have previously noted, each speech category offers something unique—each has a defining aspect. Sometimes, it is fairly easy to determine what the defining aspect of a category is (e.g., Informative and Persuasive). Other times, it can be somewhat difficult to...
