Research
Researching is probably the most boring aspect of LD debate; however, you have to find your evidence in some way. Novice LDers usually get the Google craze, which isn’t as bad as it sounds. Just keep it to a minimum. More advanced debaters will hit the library (yes books rule) or use research databases such as Jstor, Lexus Nexus, Blackwell Synergy, Project Muse, etc. Unfortunately subscription for these sites costs a bajillion dollars. Your best bet is to find a friend with access, particularly college friends. They have a user and password for their university database which most likely has access to those sites.
Once you have a couple of relevant books and/or articles, you begin a process called “cutting”. This simply means copying the important parts of the book into an organized document. Usually people extract the important information and cite the source (ex. MLA format) right above. The result is something called a “card” (the citation, followed by the important paragraph or piece of information). People generally cut cards while reading the article or book, rarely do they finish reading and then go back to cut. Finally, make sure you have cards for both sides of the topic since you will be debating both sides.
Cutting cards may be extremely boring, but it is crucial to do so because that is usually how you get unique and well warranted arguments. Additionally, all of the background knowledge of the topic that you do not cut will be extremely useful for your rounds. So how much time should you spend cutting? This really depends on when your first tournament is. The best strategy is to cut as many cards as you can until two weeks before the tournament. As a novice you will be safe cutting 30 minutes every day. When there are two weeks before your tournament, start writing cases. You want to finish by the end of that week. The following week should be solely dedicated to practice debating your teammates and revising your cases afterwards. Because this is a page dedicated to the life of a Lincoln Douglas debater, specific details that go into formatting a case and things of that nature will not be explained here.
Check out this helpful PDF file: (
click here). This PDF has all of the instructions on how to write cases.
When you are finished with your first tournament you will want to continue cutting cards on the topic. Yes, you must. The World Wide Web is infinitely wide just so you can find more arguments and write more cases. Having 2 cases on each side of the resolution is ideal for local tournaments. You may want 3-4 cases on each side if you plan to debate nationally.
This article was written by Xi Lin
