by Patrick McDonald | Feb 11, 2021 | Speaking, Strategy
He’s asleep. He’s literally asleep. When that thought pierced into my mind, my initial reaction was one of astonishment. I was roughly halfway through my Persuasive speech, and five feet in front of me was the head judge, his head peacefully at rest on his chair,...
by Patrick McDonald | Dec 31, 2020 | Speaking
“At the end of the day… Moving down the flow… The fact of the matter is…” What do all of these fragments have in common? For one, they operate as “crutch words,” phrases that serve no purpose apart from buying you time to think of what you are going to say...
by Anthony Severin | Dec 21, 2020 | Judging/Judges, Speaking, Technique
We Ethos coaches frequently hear despair about how judges receive theory-heavy arguments. There’s a perception that judges despise topicality, counterplans never win rounds, and hardly anybody has even heard of a kritik… and those who have heard of a kritik just think...
by Nathan Wang | Dec 18, 2020 | From Intermediate to Advanced, Speaking, Technique
My family and I adore soy sauce. We have soy sauce with our rice, soy sauce with our stir-fry, soy sauce in our noodle soup, and even soy sauce on our desert. Chinese food, (like most food out there) is terribly bland without some form of seasoning to enhance the...
by Patrick McDonald | Dec 17, 2020 | Speaking
“In this rebuttal, I want to go down the flow and refute everything my opponent has said thus far and explain why, at the end of the day, you should vote for me.” This line, in all of its iterations, is useless. For one thing, it is outstanding only in its mediocrity....
by Ben Brown | Nov 26, 2020 | Best Resources, From Intermediate to Advanced, Speaking
I completely understand people who hate 1AR’s. In a poll of over 150 Team Policy debaters of all experience levels, over sixty percent responded that they thought the 1AR was the hardest speech in the entire debate round. Not only is the 1AR speaker forced to spend...
