[Music] hello my name is isaac i'm a heart house debater and i'm recording this video as part of hart house's outreach initiative where we make videos explaining basic aspects of how to debate in this video i'm going to be talking about whip speeches how to prepare for them and how to give them whip speeches are one of the most unique or maybe the most unique type of speech and they can be a lot of fun once you learn how to do them but they also have some different rules it's important to know about so this video is going to cover three things first off it's going to cover the basics of what a whip does in other words what are your goals what do you do as a whip then it's going to offer some advice on how to structure whip speeches in other words how you should organize them and finally it's going to look at what you can do to prepare for whip speeches when you're in prep time and when you're in the debate so first off on the basics of what a whip does as a whip speaker you are the last speaker or one of the last two speakers in the debate you speak at the end of the round after the two extension speeches you have two broad goals one is to provide a biased summary of the round in other words to summarize what all of the major arguments made by the different teams have been but to do so in a way that is favorable to your side and in particular to your team as closing government or closing opposition your second goal is to explain why specifically your team's material and in particular your partner's extension was the best material in the debate so the two goals to summarize and to explain why you won given those goals you will do a few things as a whip speaker number one you offer refutation as with almost every other speech you don't have to refute everything you focus on refuting the things that you need you think need to be refuted i.e the most important issues notably you don't refute your own front half so if you're closing government the government whip you would not refute opening government but you could refute either opposition team and the same applies vice versa if you are the opposition whip second you rebuild or protect the extension so your partner has given an extension it is your team's unique material in the debate the other side will attack that extension and give reasons why it is wrong or not important so part of your job then for the second part is to rebuild or defend that extension against attacks by explaining how it is still valid the third thing that you would want to do is weigh your extension against other material in the round in other words given that you've got a win with your one or two arguments that were offered in the extension speech you want to try and explain why those arguments are more true or more valid than the other arguments that have been made in the debate so those are the main things that a whip speaker typically does and notably they do not offer new constructive arguments so that's something important to remember they're the only speech that can't make entirely new arguments so you should make a note of that now on to the second part of this video looking at ways that you can structure a whip speech now obviously most speeches structure themselves around the main arguments but if you don't have main arguments because you can't make them and you're supposed to address a lot of different issues there's this question of how specifically you should structure the speech so that it makes sense and you're not just randomly talking about different things that different people said at different times so what we encourage people to do to structure their whips is to structure them either around themes or around team by team response so i'll explain both of those approaches first off under themes and you could also call this option questions what you want to do is look for the two or three most important issues in the debate and then categorize all of your rebuttal that is relevant to those issues and all of your extension material that's relevant to those issues under that theme so that you deal with each theme one by one in a way that is organized so for instance if the topic was this house would make voting mandatory one theme might be rights i.e do people have the right to choose not to vote an uh so that's how it could also be framed as a question so the theme could be called rights the question could be do people have the right not to vote another talk another question or another theme might be does forcing people to vote improve politics so under each of those themes or questions you would categorize the material you have that is relevant so that's one way that you can organize a whip and that is probably the most popular way is to offer those two or three themes and then proceed through them the other way that you can do this is to organize the speech in a team by team format in other words where you address each team and explain why you beat them so for instance you might have if you are the government whip uh in addressing opening gov you have to show that your material is more important than theirs so you might start the whip speech by saying i will address opening gov and then explain why your material is more important than theirs and then say i will address opening off and then refute their arguments and explain why yours are better and then do the same with closing opposition so that's the other popular way so to reiterate then the two options that most people do are to organize the speech around themes slash questions and the other is to organize around team by team engagement final part of this video is on what to do in prep and what to do in the round in other words a sort of practical guide to the situation where you're assigned a whip and you say okay what do i actually do to make sure that i'm ready so first off on what you do in prep time with your partner the first thing for you to remember is that because you speak at the end of the round you don't need to start writing the actual speech that you're going to give right away and in fact you can't because your job is to summarize and you don't know what other people are going to say so what you should be doing in prep is trying to think about what all of the arguments different teams could make are so that you have a sense of what they might say and about trying to think of refutation for the arguments that you think the other team might make the other thing that you should be doing in prep is talking with your partner the extension speaker and helping them figure out what the extension should be in other words what are some of the different arguments that might not be taken that could be turned into an extension and then if you have time thinking about ways that you could strengthen those extensions for instance examples that you could give or particular ways of phrasing the argument i want to finally note on this that you should really resist the temptation to try and write a whip speech during prep you speak at the end of the round so you should focus on writing the actual speech during the round when you know what people are saying not trying to guess what they're going to say before the best way to use that time is to think of hypothetical arguments so that you're prepared to respond to what people say finally what should you do in the round a couple things number one you should share any ideas you have with your partner just by whispering so that you can maintain communication during the first couple speeches so the prime minister and leader of opposition uh you should listen and establish where the debate is going so what are the big arguments what's the model how do things look for front half as front half progresses you should record the major things each team is saying and do things like make rebuttal of the opposing team but also just note what the case of your own front half team is once you understand what front half is running you can do two things number one you help your partner find the extension or they tell you what the extension is at which point you can start thinking about what you do to strengthen that extension the second thing is now that you know where the debate is going you can figure out what your themes or questions should be and then you can start categorizing the information for summary that you wrote down earlier finally when you're listening to your partner actually giving the extension you should try to think critically about what they're doing well and what they could do better so then during your whip you can try to strengthen that extension by rebuilding it in ways where you address what they missed by filling in gaps or by defending what the other team says against the extension so those are the types of things you should focus on in the round and that sort of concludes a brief introduction to what whips do and how you should approach trying to do it uh so thank you all for watching this video if you have any questions i encourage you to reach out to hart house on facebook and please stay tuned for more videos thank you you