Cutting a Large File Part 2

The next thing we have to deal with is how to prevent overlap within the group. It has many down sides, but the only way to avoid overlap is generally to divide mediums- i.e. one person take books, another take google, another take lexis , another take certain journal databases etc. Even this approach isn't perfect- journals are sometimes on lexis or specific articles will be in a book etc. but other than every person telling every other person the name and author of every single article they read this is the best way to do it. A limited amount of communication can also prevent this smaller risk of overlap reducing the burden of wading through doe

Why is avoiding overlap so important? It wastes time. If two people cut the same article, that is time that could have been spent cutting a different article gone forever, particularly if the article in question is long- say a law review article of 50-60k words. Also, you usually won't figure this out till the sorting process which could waste more time. Overlap is highly likely because many articles talk about multiple issues related to the topic. So if you are research an ethanol negative, and one person is supposed to write the warming disad and another person is supposed to cut the food prices DA, many of the better articles on ethanol will discuss both. So unless everyone in the group is ignoring all good cards that aren't on their particular topic you will have overlap (if they are ignoring them it creates the chance that you will miss a lot obviously).

So now you each have your area, you've divided up the research medium and cut your cards. You've sent emails notifying people about new arguments you've found cards on so they can think about them/look for cards. Now what do you do?

An important organizational thing is to organize a complete file at least 3 times before you are done with the file. So after a few days, you all compile your cards and produce a roughly organized file. This seems annoying to many kids because since they don't have experience organizing things this takes them forever. If you have 300 pages of cards it should take you (with a document map) about 45 minutes for 1 person to organize roughly. With 2-3 people this can be wrapped up in a Simpsons episode easily. Now you have the roughly organized file, you need to find all the holes in it and then start over researching those. Most people wait till the last minute and hope that prayer alone will guarantee they have all the evidence they need for their file. Remember the permits list in the last post- you need lots of cards both ways on all those issues (for the aff and the neg).

You do this 2-3 times depending on how much time you have. Now you have a several hundred page file, its time to impose the quality control. A few guidelines

-you will never need more than 5 cards on the issue- almost any issue. By issue I mean something small, like "Warming anthropogenic", in a warming file you may have hundreds of these issues, but never in a debate will you read more than 5 cards on that or any other issue really, so find the 5 best, and delete the rest

-Best to worst- organize them on the block so that the best card is first, second best card is second etc. This way you will read your best cards all the time, and if you run out of time you haven't missed as much as if your best card is 3^rd

-have specific headers- don't just say "Permits hurt economy" subdivide among warrants, like "Permits hurt economy- Electricity prices" and "Permits Hurt Economy- Speculation". Obviously this process can become infinitely regressive, but remember you don't want a lot of 1 card per page so it's a balance between the two.

-certain arguments have constraints that make some evidence better than others even if the card itself is not better in argument quality- dates for uniqueness evidence, source for issues where bias is obvious/a factor- take this into account