Researching a Large File - Part 1

First let me deal with some meta level issues before getting into the nitty gritty of research.

When I say large file I mean like a aff or topic DA like oil etc. Something where the end product will be large, nuanced, and you will have to be ready for lots of counter arguments.

1. Start broad- get narrow. Many kids at camp get into an aff research group and say “what is our plan text going to be?”. This is a backwards approach- the fine details like the plan will be the last thing you do. You don’t decide you are going to do a 23.4 percent RPS and then look for solvency evidence, you try and read as much as possible about RPS and figure out what plan text you can support with evidence.

Second, you need to think broad in terms of every conceivable disad or advantage. For this topic if you read a negative incentive you are going to have to prepare for dozens of industry disads/pics like steel, auto industry, below the poverty line etc. You need to find offense against all of these and more. The way you do this is to first read generally about the topic/your area, then write an argument list. This is a place where lab leaders are UNBELIEVABLY helpful. 90 percent of the lab leaders in the country probably debated or coached on at least the college energy topic, and many of them were involved in the last high school energy topic as well. They can help you get a huge initial list of arguments. The reason it is important to do this early is so you don’t MISS CARDS when reading an article because you think they are unimportant. This is also why lab leaders go through your articles- to make sure you are catching all the cards. The more things you know about , the more answers you can be looking for. For example, here is an initial list I gave to my permits group this week:

Permits Aff
Leadership Advantage
-soft power low
-rejection of kyoto hurt soft power
-permits/action on warming restores leadership
-EU angry about no permits
-soft power key to hegemony
-environmental leadership solves global problems (non hegemony)
Economy advantage
-grid sucks/blackouts coming
-renewables solve the grid
-permits cause renewables/investment in infrastructure
-other grid bad impacts
- terrorism etc

Other advantages
-permits solve warming
-solve EU relations
-solve oil prices/dependence
-renewables key to the economy
-international linkage
Im not gonna list disads/CPs twice- so remember you need answers and the neg arg for the ones listed below
DA Answers
-nuke power
-economy
-biz con
-energy prices
-agriculture
-steel
-semi conductors
-politics
-federalism
-auto industry
-industrial flight

Mechanisms
-auctions/grandfathering
-banking/borrowing
-upstream/downstream
-phased in/immediate

CP's
-carbon tax
-states
-voluntary
-incentives


That is a huge list obviously, but its probably only 50 percent of the things you need to be ready for to read a permits aff if you want to compete at the top level.

So you need to make an argument list, and if you are working in a group you need to talk about these lists and keep everyone informed so that no one misses anything and you all know whats up. In an ideal world, a lab leader can read through every single article. In reality any lab leader who is able to do this has some lazy kids. If you have 8 kids in a research group who only do work for the like 5 hour library time, that’s a 40 hour work week just going over their articles. In reality in a group of 8 4 kids probably spend 90 percent of their time G-chatting each other and watching youtube, 2 kids do a decent amount of work and maybe 2 are pretty hard working and go above and beyond library time and cut cards at night/in their rooms.

I break this math down every summer and kids are blown away, but for the official transcript let me do it once here:

At debate camp you will spend probably a week on a file – 7 days
You get at least 5 hours a day of library time/working in lab- 5

So we have 30 hours of work you should be putting in

Assume you can only cut 5 cards per hour ( a ridiculous assumption) that is 150 cards for the assignment from each kid. 8 kids in the group =1200 cards, 3 cards per page= 400 pages. This is assuming no additional cards from a lab leader.

This is the ABSOLUTE BARE MINIMUM. 5 cards an hour is nothing- its 12 minutes a card. That gives you enough time to cut a card, and then mess around for like 10 minutes making 50 minutes of every hour screwing around.

Needless to say the amount of 400 page files produced at camp is next to nill. (this example ignored quality obviously, but given the rest of the generous number fudging I think the impact is negligible)

When I was in high school and went to the DDI one of the lab leaders expected kids to cut 100 cards PER DAY, and that was before templates/laptops/the interweb… ok maybe not the last one.

I won’t belabor this anymore, just stop being lazy. Its not that hard to put in a 5 hour work day and get a good file

2. BOTH WAYS- for the love of god you have to do the aff and the neg. Every summer countless files get turned out that only have ½ the debate on a lot of key issues. This not only makes practice debates worthless- since the aff has no answers to a DA or the neg has no answers to an advantage, but also is just a bad habit to learn. IF you cut a disad or advantage, you need to turn out decent answers.

The important thing to remember here is- offense/defense. You need both. For every advantage and every disad/disad impact.

Sometimes kids think, if I don’t turn out a neg I will be unbeatable. No, you won’t be.

Other times kids only download aff sounding articles and skip the neg assuming someone else will do it. Don’t.

People probably already think I’m anti practice debate, but one of the reason camp practice debates are crappy is that the neg just throws a wall of garbage out there with no strategy, and the aff does the same. If you have well researched files- i.e. a case neg that contains a STRATEGY and not just advantage defense and politics links, and then aff answers to said strategy- you can actually start to improve in debates and start learning how to write quality blocks.