Please don’t accuse me of arrogance or condemn me as conceited because of this next statement, but being good at debate isn’t hard. For the first two years of my time in the NCFCA I kept asking myself what makes a debate team good. What’s that seemingly intangible x-factor that makes some teams, or speakers, better than all the rest? What’s that one ingredient in the recipe for success that must be had to go from losing in octas to winning finals? Then, about halfway through my third year of competition I figured it out. The real secret to succeeding in debate, or at least for setting yourself up to succeed, is hard work. Unfortunately this secret isn’t glamorous or exciting but – in my mind at least – it’s also encouraging. Let me tell you why, and what hard work actually looks like.

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Before I do any of that, though, I should probably clarify a few things. When I say that being good at debate just requires hard work I don’t mean that hard work guarantees you success. Some people are naturally going to be better communicators than others. To a degree, at least, talent can’t always be overcome with effort. We also all know that sometimes dumb luck plays into debate. Your judge truly does affect how your round is going to go. But even with all of that said, hard work is still incredibly important. Working hard ensures two key things. First, it ensures that you’re the best debater you possibly can be. Second, it sets you up for doing as well as you possibly can.

One of the true beauties of debate is that effort tends to equate to results. Like I said just a moment ago, this doesn’t always hold up, but in a general sense those who work the hardest do the best. It’s very easy as a young debater to watch the people that win tournaments and get discouraged. There’s a sort of image surrounding successful debaters which makes them like they just have something that you don’t. But, the real truth of the matter is that almost every truly dominant debater works a whole lot harder than the people he or she competes against. From my personal experience, the teams that do the best are almost without fail the ones that work harder than anyone else. And I think that’s great, and very encouraging. Why? Because it means that you don’t have to be some sort of genius, or Martin Luther King Jr. reincarnate, to be a good debater. Instead, excelling takes a different kind of genius. If you want to be good at debate you just have to become a genius at hard work.

At this point you’re probably wondering what I actually mean. In my mind, working hard can be broken down into a couple of key things:

1) Spend time accumulating general knowledge about your topic. It doesn’t matter if its Team Policy, Lincoln Douglas, Public Forum, or Moot Court, you need to know what you’re talking about. In my experience the best debater in the room is usually the one that knows the most. General knowledge means that if the topic is election law in America you don’t just know the problems with a case to implement instant runoff voting, you also understand the big picture purpose of elections in the United States. If your topic is reforming the United Nations you’ve read up on when and why the United Nations was founded and you’ve actually read through the organization’s charter. In short, read up on everything. Know the most. When you do, you’re rarely caught by surprise and come across as credible.

During my time in debate I commonly won rounds not because I was some sort of master orator but instead because I just knew a lot more about the topic than the other team did.

2) Be as prepared as you possibly can be. This sort of ties into point #1, but that was discussing a macro-focus on accumulation of knowledge. What I mean here is that you need to also do very specific preparation geared towards particular cases and particular arguments.

For negative, this means you lay everything out in advance. Brief all the cases. After you’ve got your briefs, pick your favorite arguments from the briefs and put them in separate documents. Make these into tailored strategies against each case. Go ahead and pre-plan out impacts. Create, ahead of time, powerful introductions and conclusions. Be sure to come up with philosophies or your focus for the round. During my time preparing for nationals in my senior year I pre-wrote catchy introductions, and came up with negative philosophies, against 54 cases. If you know how the negative team responds to an argument you’re going to run, then research and write out responses to their responses ahead of time.

For affirmative, being as prepared as possible means doing extensive research. Try and find every single article about your case, read it and quote relevant quotes from it. Fine-tune the rhetoric and layout/content of your 1AC. Plan out powerful introductions and conclusions for pivotal speeches like the 2AR. Make a list of every argument that anyone’s run, or that they could run, against your case and then write out a list of responses to each of those arguments. Even more importantly, brainstorm how you yourself would try and beat your case, and then write out responses to the arguments you’d make against it.

3) Think about how to improve and practice on implementing those improvements. All too often, in Team Policy in particular, debaters stop thinking about the act of debating itself. People get so caught up in arguments and cases and values and research and forget that before all of that you need to understand your strengths and weaknesses as a debater. Are you monotone? Do people still complain about your organization? Do you routinely fail to impact things? Are you just plain boring? How well do you and your partner work together in round? Do you still stick to labeling arguments under stock issues like its the only holy thing to do? Do you come across like a debate robot or a person? Pin-point your strengths and weaknesses through some self-analysis, but also ask others for help with this. When you’ve got a list of things to work on, actually work to change them.

This means practice rounds, or it means telling your partner to give you feedback after each round about whether you’re actually making progress. In my second year of Policy competition I would literally tell my partner “James, you genuinely did horribly in that round”, if he actually had, and he’d do the same with me. Now… that’s not the best method for everyone, but you need to communicate with either your partner or other debaters about what they think you should improve on. Know the most about the topic, write briefs against everything, but don’t forget that actually being a good communicator takes more than just knowledge of the facts.

4) Seek counsel from sources you respect. Through my three years in debate, outside advice was pivotal to my success. In my first year I constantly was asking questions. I sent Bruce Ragas, a lovely debater from my region, probably a hundred emails asking simple questions in my first year. Andy Hudson, who won LD nationals several years ago and is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, helped me a huge degree too throughout my entire career. During my third and final year, Ryan Collins – probably the best Policy debater I’ve ever seen – also helped me an incredible amount. The funny thing is that I probably asked Ryan more questions about ways to improve, or about case-specific advice, than I asked anyone else anything in my first two years. As a senior I sought more advice from the people I respected than in my sophomore year. You’re never too good to be helped. There’s always someone smarter than you or better than you that’s graduated and can help you out. Find them and beg for their assistance. Bribe them into it if you have to.

If you’ve survived the gigantic wall of text above then I don’t have much more to say. Working hard takes a huge investment of time. It isn’t always fun. It doesn’t guarantee you win. I can tell you one thing with certainty though. Being good at debate doesn’t require you to be a Mensa-qualified genius or anything like that. It requires you to be a genius of hard work. Putting in the time and expending the effort will ensure that you’re the best debater that you can be, and it creates the most likely scenario in which you’ll be successful. So, next time you lose that round that you just know you should have won, quit complaining and get to working.

Josh Webb competed in Team Policy in the NCFCA for three years, winning six regional team policy tournaments along the way (two of which being regional invitational championships). He also competed in LD and Parli through STOA for one year. All told, he was a 12-time debate finalist with seven first-place finishes. Today he’s a rising sophomore at Patrick Henry College in Virginia and is trying to figure out what to do with his life, but is loving every minute of it.