Transcript for:
Mastering Whipping in BP Debating

make it interesting but as I'm sure everyone who's here is aware it's also a very complicated speaker role it's one that's very difficult and one that's very frustrating at times so what I want to talk about here is whipping more broadly in relation to the Strategic aspect of BP debating so I want to focus Less on the basics of what you do as a web and focus more on what it takes to level up your web speeches uh what it takes to win debates as the Whip and what you should be identifying or what the problems and blunders you might be running into are that are preventing you from giving the best speeches you can that being said though I want to make clear that this also isn't just a seminar about whipping I know speaker role-based seminars tend to turn off a lot of people because they think I never speak with I have a partner who does WHIP so why should I pay attention but I think many of the Strategic notes I'll highlight in this are things that trickle down into giving opening speeches giving member speeches giving extension speeches and are things that you would generally like to identify or keep in mind in your debating as a whole uh that's a fairly lengthy introduction but there's one last part of the introduction which is obviously uh the series of talks is being organized uh for free so very generously by the organizational Committee of Sando that's a tournament that will be held from December two to four uh there's a pretty cool cap you guys have probably seen them do check it out it will be a good opportunity for you guys to get some pre-worlds or pre-abp training in I will be there as a member of the ca team and hopefully you will have a bunch of fun motions for you guys so yeah hope to see you there what more specifically are we going to talk about in this talk so I boiled it down into five main parts the first is what the goals of a web speech are what do you want to achieve and I think this uh first part is something that is really what separates a lot of beginner web speeches for more on intermediate level web speeches where a lot of the time beginners come into it and they're immediately confused by what they should or should not be doing they think this isn't very straightforward it's not as simple as just giving responses or just giving response uh or just giving out the substantive case it's very difficult to structure things at times it's very difficult to know what you even want to do at each point in the speech which is kind of what I want to clarify in this first part from there I want to move on into more details about the content so what you want more specifically in a good grip speech what kind of content do you expect how do you know what to leave out how do you know what not to do I think many speakers have uh pointed out that being a good whip is all often feels like an impossible balancing act because by the end of a BP around there are so many things you're managing so many different threads of argumentation so many different ideas that you want to get out and sometimes the question is more of what can you leave out what is it that you don't have to say in the speech versus what is it that is absolutely necessary to getting you that way the third part will be about structures uh and this I think will be a more interesting part of the speech because as debating has kind of evolved there have been more and more ways to structure bbp whips some are more conventional some are less conventional I want to walk through some of the common structures that are around in DP I don't want to prescribe a single one and kind of let you guys see what the pros and cons of them are for yourselves and then the fourth and fifth parts will be more notes on whipping and notes on debating as a web so what you should be doing in prep how you should be working with your partner how you should be communicating the extension what you should be listening to in the cases of the other teams and more broad strategic notes that didn't fit with any of the main points that I wanted to get across hopefully by the end of all of this we'll have time for questions because I think that'll be a more valuable part of the talk so hopefully we can fit this in about 30 to 40 minutes okay uh let's begin with the honest concession whipping is hard uh how do you debate when you're not supposed to give arguments seems like it doesn't make sense I know as a novice I was very hesitant to give web speeches or to even do the web speaker role at all it was always something my uh more experienced or more knowledgeable partner would do and I was kind of relegated to the member position where I could give out a case that oh I wouldn't say it was fed to me but a case that was more structured a case that was more prepared it's very intimidating to go into a closing half and be expected to give a speech without having much preparation at all often when you're the whips uh for CG or Co you don't know what it is you're going to say and even when you do have thoughts about how you want to structure the speech coming into it from prep you'll so often have to scrap that and come up with something entirely different because the Dynamics of the debate just didn't play out how you wanted them stellar whip speech can and has many times in the top rounds of many top tier tournaments like ADP like worlds single-handedly won rounds all on its own sometimes the member's speech can be lackluster sometimes it can't deliver the extension as precisely as might be ideal but a whip speech can resurrect the case it can bring it back pull it to the Forefront of the judges mind and make it seem like you were winning from the beginning but on the other hand it's so easy for a mediocre whip speech or an average whip speech to lose the debate it's so easy to slip up and make minor mistakes that are enough for your us even a stellar members feature Stellar extension speech to get overlooked to get unfairly credited to get weighed against or to get responded to in a way that's not charitable so the point here is there are very very many things that can go wrong in a whip speech but when you get it right and when you work on it and when you work towards uh getting everything out that you should should get out in the round then your performance can really carry an entire team can carry an entire case it's something you'll feel proud of um I know there are many speakers who are sort of career in their speaker roles so their whole time they do PM they do DPM their whole time they remember their whole time they do web and as someone who's kind of uh not a career whip but someone who's been funneled into that position over time I can say this has been the most rewarding speaker position to do it's not the easiest to do it's definitely not the most fun to do there will be many times where you feel like you you let down your team where you feel like you didn't have the responses you didn't have the weighing to carry the case but when you get it right uh and when you know that it was your analysis that wandered around or when you know that you defended a case that both you and your partner are really proud of it it there's nothing in debating I think that matches that feeling quite as well but that's a personal preference or obviously I'm biased whipping is hard but whipping is worth it let's get to the first part then what am I even trying to do with my web speech what are the goals of the word speech and I think these are important to take note of because a lot of the time even intermediate or even slightly Advanced speakers come into it with a very shotgun mentality they come into it with a idea that they will just go through their flow of Consciousness and say whatever comes to mind and that will be enough to win them the debate and obviously while that can sometimes work that's not a very consistent or reliable strategy or approach to whipping as a whole what I think is the more productive way of thinking about it is to ask yourself from the perspective of the judge what you would need to know by the end of a debate from a closing house team or from a bottom half team in order to credit them to win or in order to evaluate their extension at all I think more specifically that comes in the form of answering three questions the first is providing strategic positioning so answer the question why we win why is our extension the most valuable contribution in this round what is our extension in the first place uh that might seem a little uh confusing if my team a little redundant why is it my job as a web to be clarifying that kind of thing shouldn't it have come out remember but as we'll discuss later on a lot of the Dynamics of the debate change after your extension has been responded to and a lot of your job at whip will be securing the validity of that extension throughout the realm even as things evolve so even as new responses come up even as an entirely new extension comes up that probably has an entire different frame an entire different way of weighing things out or prioritizing impacts in the realm you have to explain why you still win despite all of that which sort of leads into the second goal of a web speech which is to clear the path for the extension explain why you still win that comes in two parts it comes first uh in terms of Defending against all the tax raised by the opposite closing so looking at the responses evaluating them explaining to the judge why they don't fly or why they don't take down the mechanisms they're meant to but it also comes in a defensive validity weighing your extension against opening so a lot of the time web speakers get frustrated or get under credited and blamed for the extension not being new it see a lot of the time especially judges who aren't listening so clearly or listening so intently to the round are actively looking for ways to discredit the closing team they're actively looking for ways to say that the extension is redundant it's repetitive it's the same material that's derivative as opening and while that's unfortunate that's not the way debates should be evaluated or closing half cases should be evaluated it's something that you as the web speaker definitely have to be aware of especially as rounds get closer and closer in skill Debaters get uh better at running their cases and there aren't these slam dunk wins or clear paths to Victory you have to know how to play the margins and make it seem like you were addressing all the nuances of the openings case that weren't there the final part or the final goal of a web speech more broadly is to eliminate the chances of any other team winning so explain why the other teams can't win that comes in the form of responses uh which I think in a web speech is more in line of pointing out the obvious and I'll discuss what I mean by that later on when we get to this part of the of the talk but what I will flag now is there's a lot of contention about bringing up new material in a web speech what counts as bringing up your material Etc I won't weigh in on that because obviously different Edge cores in different circuits will have their own opinions on it but what your job is as a web speaker knowing that people will evaluate uh new material or will discredit new material is to always make it seem like your contributions to the debate come as a direct extension of what your partner has already provided so you don't want to make it seem as if these are your responses that you are bringing up in new way you want to make it seem as if these are things that logically flow from what has already happened in the round or are simple observations that any Observer could have made with regards to their realm again we'll get back to this later on I think it is an important part uh obviously the final part of this is making sure you don't forth so there are many times uh in VP when you're whipping on the back foot where your extension didn't land as clearly as it should where it might not have been as unique or as Stellar as you planned the impacts weren't as clear and you now have to save your case from taking the fourth or if you're in a break round you have to save your case from taking the third or the fourth you have to secure a position and that's something that you uniquely do at whip it's a lot harder for your member to be thinking and doing that while they're delivering their extension so the goal of positioning your team in the round really comes down to you and we'll talk about this more again later as we move on all right let's get to the content uh let's talk about each of these more specifically strategic positioning why we win the debate I think this really comes in three parts the first is kind of constructing The Narrative of the debate and what I mean by that is while you can definitely sell the extension in a very straightforward very technical way so you say something at the start of your speech like the extension wins on three grounds uh one two three etc etc what do you really want to do in your head and what I find is more effective than most judges is constructing it more as a narrative rather than something that is more Technical and mechanistic so what has happened in the debate so far where does your extension enter and why is it that where you come in is crucial I'm sure everyone here has heard a web intro that goes something like this uh what's this debate thus far has lacked is an analysis of the interests of X Y or Z actor the reason that no other team in this debate can be credited is because they assert uh Etc about this actor where we are the only team that proves structurally what their incentives are you explain in that intro what has happened so far where your extension comes in and why that entry point of your extension is crucial uh obviously that intro wasn't the most creative that isn't the best or most compelling intro you can come up with but it in a few lines and a few in as short a time as possible as concisely as possible explains what your entry point or your strategy for taking on the round is and that's something that you should be conscious of during the web speech I'm a big fan of putting this part of the content in the intros of a web speech but you can also do it in other parts you might want to front load some responses if you think they're important front loads and clarifications take out the opposite closing team and then put this somewhere in the middle or maybe even if you're very good at managing your time put this at the end of your speech kind of just to leave the judge with the conclusion of where you win the debate the point is you should have an overarching idea of what the strategy of all other teams has been explaining why it doesn't stack up to your own strategy and then explaining where yours comes in um the second and kind of counterpart of this is changing the narrative so oftentimes your extension won't stand on uh untouched after you remember speech so if your closing team is uh as intent as they should be either in the round they will respond to it oftentimes your closing theme might even be a lot stronger than the top half teams that came before you they might have a much newer much more creative frame that needs to be responded to right away or they might just have a new piece of material that changes the debate significantly a good example of this is in IR rounds where nobody really has any footing or nobody has like the it's obvious that nobody has the complete factual context for a situation or for emotion and you're in CG you come up with an extension and then suddenly you discover that CEO knows everything about the motion they have like a lot of spec matter they have the most informed case in that position you want to be flexible enough to change The Narrative of your case to explain why it also fits what this new priority of the debate is so um I think uh so to give like a concrete example of this I remember very vividly debating emotion about uh motion about Saudi foreign policy from the perspective of the House of South and I think everyone in that realm passed a certain point was debating it from the perspective of MBS so the leader of Saudi Arabia and while that was fine I think uh very brilliant closing team came in with their simple analysis that the house of Saud isn't just MBS it's not just Muhammad bin Salman it's 10 000 people who all have entire royal family and their interests are very different from what MBs is in really linked to the motion characterization and this more linked perspective of what the priorities of the debate should be that meant explain why you still fit those new incentives that were introduced if you wanted to stand in the debate if you wanted to have any chance of standing in debate uh yeah so that's part two so you know when to change the narrative the third thing here is to constantly be asking yourself what the debate needs so after every speaker ask yourself what isn't explained yet what are things that other teams are saying but are insufficient what are the gaps that you can identify as important and where can you come in so all of these things will help you develop that narrative eventually when you do have to get to your speech so keep asking yourself these strategic questions and by the time you get to your speech you should have it developed already as a complete train of thought uh in your own speech part two clearing the path so what do you want to do how do you want to rebuild the extension again I think this comes in three parts the first is to invalidate the responses or respond to their responses um this is a lot more crucial than take teams make it out to be a lot of teams kind of a lot of whips kind of turn off their brain uh or tunnel vision into writing their own speech instead of listening to the member speech before them or instead of listening to the web speech before them and the problem with that is you tend to overlook a lot of the strongest responses to your case and your extension that mean even if you whip that extension really well you prove that it's the most relevant thing in the round there are just so many logical gaps in that extension at that point in time that there's no way a judge is going to believe it or even if you don't think those logical gaps are valid you think the other team had like very bad responses the problem is that the judge thinks there are all of these responses and all of these barriers to your extension winning the round that you have to deal with and you don't have to deal with them in depth if you really don't think they're all that good you have to call out the responses as being disingenuous you have to call them out for being weak you have to provide an explanation at least for why they don't stop you from winning um crucial part of this that I think a lot of rip speakers are afraid to do or are kind of hesitant to do is taking cross-engagement from opening so a lot of the time the strongest barriers to your extension flying come from the opening case their details the little mechanisms or little points of weighing that you yourself have overlooked and when you don't take a POI from opening or when you kind of try the ball uh I think the term box out is kind of outdated but you try to make them irrelevant by not bringing them up or not giving them chance to engage with you you run the risk of just having a very good judge who tracked all of their material bring up the obvious that you haven't responded to the great thing about taking a POI from opening is you get to see what they think is relevant about their case or what they think is the most relevant response at that point in time and you kind of get to shut it down right away um obviously it won't always go well there are times when you'll give a bad POI response where you might get caught off guard by like the analysis that another team provides um I think the and this speaks more generally to a mindset of debating you have to do things that are hard as with uh you shouldn't be thinking about it just in terms of what it takes to win one round maybe if you're at the major maybe if you're at the highest levels of competition you can focus on what's right in front of you but if you're seriously trying to improve like in any sport sometimes you have to do things that might make you take the L as bad as it sounds uh just so you can learn just so you can adapt to them just so you can build the habits of doing things that are hard and eventually get those skills so this isn't just about ripping a lot of teams are afraid of running hard cases a lot of teams are afraid of running cases that are principled because they don't feel like they're good at running principles or teams are afraid of doing econ motions because they don't feel like they're good at doing econ motions but these are things you have to practice and these are things you have to learn to not be afraid of uh that was a bit of a tangent but I think it's important especially for web speakers to take note of okay the second part of this is extending across frames so each extension or each argument in the round will lay out a clear priority or what you think the most important impact is the problem is sometimes the judge won't believe that priority so you want to show not just why your extension stands as in it stands mechanistically you want to show why it stands in terms of being relevant across the different frames that teams provide so I think this is quite common when teams say oh it's not about economic impacts about the Democracy or whatever it's about this principle that we introduce in our extension and you want to compare yourselves to those things and explain either why those priorities aren't as important as the other team makes them out to be or explain why you Co-op those priorities or get them better uh the final part here about clearing the pathway this part of the content section is making sure to compare yourself to other teams don't rely on the judge to kind of go through these mental gymnastics Hoops for you you want to pick up grounds for comparison with each team and win them clearly so don't ignore your own top half or kind of neglect to mention them in your speech just because you think you are already clearly winning over them if you are clearly winning over them you should be able to explain that or clarify that to the judge in a way that's concise that doesn't take up so much of your time and that would allow you to move on to more responsive material but you shouldn't leave that out of your web speech so explain quite clearly why you went over your opening path so our extension provides you with X impact or it provides you with Y analysis the reason this analysis is crucial is because it is already winning or uh an over top half that's because top half doesn't do this part of their argument that is necessary for it to fly we provide that which is why we're beating them move on to the next comparison uh the point is just to make sure you have a comparison to each other team don't leave that out okay the final part of the content section is eliminating the other games so this is what people classically think of when they think about quipping they think about responses they think about outgoing other teams how do you want to go about that the first tip I kind of want to give here is sometimes you want to dodge the force and build up to the first so what I mean by that is in harder rounds or in rounds that are very close or in rounds that can go anyway uh anyway like the call isn't clear it's not clear who's winning it's not clear which the contributions matter the most you want to make sure that you don't take the fourth especially in a long tournament where your goal is to accumulate as many points as possible so sometimes you just have to pick a team to eliminate make sure you eliminate them first and you make sure that it's clear that you are taking it over them and then go up against the stronger and stronger teams that you want to take on this is one way of doing the response strategy another way in rounds where it's clear that you are winning or where you feel like you are clearly winning you want to do the opposite so in rounds where you feel like your extension is clearly winning and you have the most relevant case you want to start by taking out the second strongest team so you want to take out the team that you perceive as the threat to taking the first and then move down to teams that you think might take the third and the fourth so it rounds where it's close you want to dodge the fourth and rounds where it's clear you want to secure the first you want to build up to the first uh the second thing to point out is you should always take out the opposite closing too many web speakers Tunnel Vision on the extension and lose to the team opposite them a lot of web speakers kind of dismiss their closing their opposite closing and uh here the first words of the extension and think ah it's redundant it's derivative I don't have to listen to the rest of their case and then they just respond to the opening theme and then they lose because there was something in the closing team or something in the closing case that was relevant that they just didn't listen to so make sure you give them time of day you don't have to give them the most you don't have to give them four minutes of your speech if you don't feel like they deserve that they're not that relevant but you should be providing at least a baseline responsive strategy or a baseline weighing for why you take it over them don't let their case stand so make sure you eliminate them um the third thing is about new responses and this is what I flagged earlier when we were at the outline so there's a lot of contention over like what's a new response what's new material can whips introduce new examples can they introduce new contacts etc etc there's a lot of debate over the rules of whipping and I I don't want to weigh in on that now but in general the way you want to prove yourself from this or you want to make sure that you don't get discredited for being new is to frame yourself as a logical extension of your previous speaker as much as possible so even when you run a new response or let's say you have a killer example you you just know it in your head that disproves the other side's case but it didn't come out at member the way you want to go about doing that is to mention the new response mention the new example that you have and then link it back to your member this example follows very clearly the logic we lay out at member speech the which explains that then insert the analysis that your members had or one of the examples that flows from the kind of argument we raise at membrane in extension is and then the example that you want to bring up so you want to provide that new response you want to provide that new matter uh is this sneaky is this unfair to your other team uh or unfair to your other closing team unfairly to your other opening I don't think so because the what you're doing when you do it this way is you are still debating with the debate that has already existed you're not introducing anything new you're not raising a new argument you're linking things back to what already happened so if you're doing this honestly if you're doing this in a way that is really about the analysis then the other teams would have had more than enough time to engage with it and you shouldn't find yourself tangential or you shouldn't find yourself irrelevant to the ground uh and at that point it's fair to bring this up it's a good way to restrench in your case uh it's a good way to bring up new responses and even when the response isn't new or even when the example isn't new it's just good practice in general to link yourself to your previous speaker to make sure that the extension sounds more coherent to make sure that the case sounds like it makes more sense all right uh that brings us to the next part of this so this is part three it's structuring the web speech so I have all of this content I know what the goals of my web speech are I know what I want to achieve how do I say it there are a bunch of different ways to structure your web speech but I think all of them need to keep three things in mind uh broadly the first is that you have to be prepared to adapt there are different structures that work best for different rounds different motions different opposing teams different judges different circuits Etc the key thing here is that you as a speaker don't get hung up on one structure and don't try to fit one structure into the debate where it really doesn't work out so a lot of whips will try to do an issue by issue structure in debates where the teams just ran so completely different cases that it doesn't make sense you essentially end up with having one issue per team at which point you might as well have done a team by team or um a lot of whips will Force themselves to do a team by team structure in a debate where both opening and closing halves had very similar debates or had very similar cases at which point they're repeating a lot of the same responses they're repeating a lot of the same points of going uh they're doing things that are redundant and wasting time that otherwise could have been spent on showing why they won the debate so make sure you're flexible kind of know which structure to adapt and when uh there's an angel question of like team by team were issues I think this is an older split in web approaches but the circuits or debate circuits as a whole tend to be moving away from the split uh you want to get rid of that mental dichotomy as soon as now you don't have to pick team by team or issues uh the best web approach has elements of both in it so you want to make sure you win the issues in the round but you also have a comparison and a direct comparison against every other team uh the third thing is priorities so any web structure whether it's team by team issues or a kind of hybrid structure should make sure you do three things the first is you want to secure the validity of the extension in the eyes of the judge that means making sure it stands up to response that means making sure it doesn't appear derivative of opening the second thing you want to have is a response to the opposite closing hat so like I said earlier that you want to make sure that you're listening to their case you want to make sure that you appear engaging and you're not just trying to dismiss them so you can get away with it uh and the final thing is to make sure you have a justification for why you win over top half that's both the long Cross or the short cross depending on which closing you are and the comparison within your bench so explaining why you beat your own opening explaining why extension is better than them any width structure that has these three priorities clearly done and clearly laid out uh should meet the goals of what you want to do with your web speech uh I'll go through a few common structures here now uh and I kind of put templates and air quotes because I don't think these are prescriptive you guys shouldn't be taking visas like be all and all structures but they might be useful especially if you're an intermediate team uh intermediate level web to kind of get the flow of what you should be doing so the first is the issue based rip so this is kind of similar to what you'd be doing in 3D V3 what you'd be doing in Asians what you'd be doing in Australia in those issues you want to make sure that you are directly flagging the extension and the contributions of each team you're responding to so per issue you want to frame the issuer and explain why it matters you want to secondly highlight your team's contribution to that issue then you want to respond to the relevant material from the other teams and finally weigh out the material that came up in the issue and provide the Strategic commentary so an example of that might be like uh the first issue in this debate is what the interests of X actor are the reason this issue matters is because the team that explains coherently with the uh what the actual priorities of the United States or the actual priorities of the actor are the team that wins the round it's preconditioned to believing any of the other impacts what we explained was so that's highlighting your team's contribution what did we hear in response and then that's where you get to the responding to the relevant material from others you might want to uh delineate it you wanna you might want to flow it as what did we hear first from closing and then what did we hear next from opening and or you might want to include a part there about why was what our opening provided insufficient to win this issue and then at the end provide the weighing and strategic commentary so if you want to learn how to kind of do this uh structure or how to master the structure I'd recommend maybe practicing a bit of 3v3 maybe watching a few 3v3 with speeches uh debates where it's more straightforward where it's not so messy are kind of the ones where this structure best applies uh the second structure is team by team so the important thing I want to note here is when you do a team by team whip don't forget to highlight the extension a lot of web speakers can get very excited uh going through a team by teamwork and kind of just go into this crazy response mode where none of it is being tied back to what the member said none of it is highlighting what the extension did so at the end of the whip you've eliminated all the other teams but it's not clear whether or not you have a leg to stand on and if everyone has no material standing you're not winning the debate over them um so again as I mentioned you can either go through teams in the order of relevance if you want to secure the first if you think it's one of the debates that's clear you want to take out the strongest team first or if you want to get if there's a lot of material it's a very messy debate all of these teams have very different ideas of what the debate is you might want to go through them in ease of response so pick the team that is easiest to respond to First make sure you eliminate them because it will take the least amount of time to do so and then move on to the teams that are harder to respond to in any case regardless of what kind of order you select per team you should have three things you should first be able to condense what their case was so what their main contribution to debate was you secondly explain to you explain your own responses to those contributions so explain why they don't stand explain why they're not as relevant as what you have or and then weigh them out against the other priorities in the debate so for example you might say something like uh I first want to deal with OG the main thrust from OG is this argument on the economic impact Etc why doesn't this stand relative to the material we provide an extension that's for three reasons one launcher response there but even if this material does stand why is it that it is irrelevant compared to what we provide in extension because that also stands and then you want to do the weighing there assuming that their case still makes sense and then you move on to the next team um okay the final kind of structure is this sort of hybrid structure that is a bit more straightforward uh I think this is like becoming more popular nowadays but I know it's also popular and like old Euros of debating but and essentially it's three parts so you first respond to your closing your opposite closing team take out their material and make sure nothing stands uh here you're not doing too much of the integrate uh oh sorry here you make sure you're doing a lot of the integrated strategic commentary to explain why you're already winning over that closing team and then the second part of the web speech is you kind of have an entire section dedicated to why the extension is winning um here your approach is kind of a little bit more like being a depth speaker where you're not so much focusing on the extension relative to specific contributions of other teams but just explaining why it's the most important priority of their own if necessary this is where you point out the shortcomings of opening so explain why what matters in debate is this mechanism or that mechanism or this point of way or this kind of perspective and then at the end of the structure only at the end of this structure do you respond to the other opening theme so you respond to oo if they had unique contributions left standing it's kind of done in a more extraneous way um admittedly the structure is a little bit more confusing uh I don't expect people to get it the first time off but the advantage of this is it lets you get through a lot of material very succinctly and it's very good in situations where you need to flip the extension or so in situations where you need to adapt to a very strong closing team or if you like your members speech didn't do enough to sell the extension this is the kind of structure you want to adopt because you're essentially giving yourself like uh three to four minutes of your speech dedicated to just rebuilding and hyping up the extension so that's when this kind of structure comes in handy okay so we've gotten structure out of the way I'm a little bit behind on uh getting through materials so I'll go through these last Parts a little bit more uh quickly in prep and in realm what you want to take note of in prep you want to focus on the extension and uh I think the general advice for closing teams is you don't want to flesh out your mechanisms entirely you don't want to do the thing where you come up with like five seven different mechanisms for a point because realistically they're gonna be eaten up by opening an opening team is going to take them or you're gonna think rethink them later on in the round and realize they aren't really that good and you're going to toss them out anyways so what's more useful in prep and the kind of discussion you want to have with your partner is imagining how the round will play out so you say oh I think OG will probably run this I think oh oh will probably run this uh in response and I think the ways we can come in at CG or like this like this like this uh the details are best left for later on because you want to give yourself many different options so you're thinking again going back to what I mentioned at the beginning you're thinking about the different narratives your extension can have the different entry points your extension can have and those are the things you want to flesh out um you can sometimes prep a vertical extension so if you think that it's a very narrow round you want to be think at that point you don't want to be thinking about specific mechanisms you want to be thinking about what areas an opening team is likely to leave out and then getting to the mechanism so you don't want to start with the substantive part of the case you want to start with the Strategic overview of the case okay what are you listening to in the round so while you're speaking there are two things that are important the first is per team you should be listening to the key arguments the headers the labels that they themselves give the arguments the main mechanisms and weighing that they give to the arguments and the general strategic framing of themselves so usually this will come in like at the depth speech uh or at the member speech when they talk about their entry point in the debate when they explain why their case is relevant to the round that's what you want to be listening to because that's how you're going to be engaging with these themes you want to explain why their strategic approach doesn't make sense or isn't what's going to win them the debate and then play around it when you're launching your own strategic approach to it um finally uh listen to your member I know a lot of web speakers do this thing where they have too much trust in their member speaker and they think the extension is going to come out as they imagine it in their heads but realistically even the most gelled together teammates will have very different ideas of an extension going into the realm the mechanisms might not come out exactly as you expect them to and there might be a lot of like analytical gaps in your member speech for a whole bunch of reasons maybe they had to respond to opening maybe they had to respond to their other other member speech before them maybe they had to take a POI that caught them off guard in any case you should be actively listening to your member speech and identifying what needs work so you can fill in that Gap when you come in as the web speaker foreign that brings me to the final part of this which is Broad strategic notes on whipping the uh and this is kind of like an FAQ section things that commonly come up or common problems that people hear the first is are there any differences in the approach of gov Whip and opwhip the answer is yes in golf web you wanna make sure that you leave room for ways to engage with OP quip uh and what I mean by that is you kind of want to be preempting what your op whip will do to re-highlight the extension that came up from them so in gov web it's very crucial that you spend a lot of time taking out Co especially if Co is strong because op web is a very powerful position in BP uh just the fact that nobody is going to respond to you A lot of the things you say will stick you get the final say on weighing you get the final say on what is relevant in the round uh so as cobweb you want to position yourself knowing that the speaker after you will be very strong um on the other hand if you're up with you wanna really take advantage of that freedom so in Opera I think the best way to do it is the kind of step back from a the very technical debating approach so you sometimes want to step back from the I need to provide new mechanisms I need to provide new responses I need to get in the weeds you want to be able to provide a more coherence like strategic overview of what happened in the round as a whole that allows you to take control of what the judge thinks matters and what the judge thinks is winning um that's that might sound a little bit abstract but might not sound concrete to you now that's something that I think you get more with practice or you understand more with practice but it's something to keep in mind uh two positioning vertical extensions how do you do it uh how do you have the time for it you want to start by being honest if you're running a vertical extension admit that it's a vertical extension as soon as members sometimes you want to admit that it's a vertical extension but then you want to explain why your vertical extension is the right place of the debate to be extending so why are the mechanisms that you provide the extra mechanisms that you provide the best mechanisms in the realm and uh recall it's not enough to provide new mechanisms or additional mechanisms they have to be so necessary to the argument that you're extending on that that argument couldn't stand without them so you really want to sell them and you really want to present them as crucial to the argument flying um the third strategic note you should know is you should know when you're running a small impact extension versus running a big impact extension because that really frames how your strategic overview of the debate is playing up so when you're running a small impact extension you think what really changes in the debate isn't this big policy isn't this big societal level reform it's just the behavior of a few individuals then you want to say that you want to describe that situation to the judge so when you're doing a small impact extension you want to make the other teams look unrealistic you want to explain why they're reaching too far why their impacts don't make sense um on the other hand when you're running a big impact extension you want to explain why the other teams are being too unchartable why they don't understand the full scope of emotion or what the changes in the motion uh fourthly on opening engagement uh again I think you should take a POI from your opening as much as possible uh unless they don't raise them or they really are just completely irrelevant in the realm the other thing is you should know and you should be able to point out when the response is cross apply so when you're raising a response to closing and that response also takes out something in opening points that out to the judge so uh take uh like flag very explicitly what the material is that it also responds to maybe responding to the same premise maybe responding to the same impact and you're outweighing the same impact from opening and closing the point is you want to be as efficient as possible with your time and find ways to lump things together so you can be more concise and so you can spend less time repeating yourself uh okay the fifth and final thing is what do you do when you have no extension standing so what do you do when you feel like you've lost around when you feel like you're on the Strategic back foot and you feel like the other teams are have a lot of material that you can't get out of the way first don't give up hope so you have to believe that you can win the debate in order for you to win the debate so don't be deflated don't comment do it with like a negative or a pessimistic mindset second you want to admit that there are shortcomings to your extension to the judge and you want to admit that to yourself and what you want to do at that point is adopt the strategy I took on earlier or I explained earlier where what matters most is dodging the force so take out the teams that are weakest try to resurrect what you have left of an extension or try to spin the extension into something else maybe the team like completely disproved your impact about your like one of your impacts maybe you disproved your impact on family it disproved your impact on the economy whatever try to see what other impacts you can extract from the extension that you still have and what other mechanisms are still standing and see if you can sell that to the judge or if not um sometimes when you don't have an extension of standing or many of your impacts are thrown into the into doubt you wanna narrow the debate in a sense and you want to make it look like it's small impact debate you want to say we should be realistic here we shouldn't be reaching for this big extraordinary impacts so what actually matters is this so even if your impacts get discredited you're providing a way for the judge to kind of believe that you're the more realistic team believe that your outcomes are more likely uh and in that sense you can kind of Resurrect The Narrative of an extension so uh bottom line whipping is not all about responses it's not all about uh mechanisms it's this new playing field where you're not just dealing with technical debating you're dealing with very strategy based debating in britpart the skill you want to develop as a whip is the ability to kind of take a step back and distance yourself from the round know what it takes for you to win know specifically how you can convince the judge that that is what you need to win and then know how you can convince the judge that you have everything you need to win um yeah that's it for the substantive portion of the talk I went way over time unfortunately there was more content than I anticipated uh but I have about seven minutes left for questions and maybe we can proceed to that portion um so I'm not sure how OC wants to do uh questions maybe people can just like type it in chat or send it to me on Zoom foreign foreign so the first one is uh privately how do you know if you sufficiently taken down the case of a specific team especially if you're doing the team by team structure so how do you know when you're you've done enough responses I think this is definitely a lot by experience and by feel but I think the very simple question to ask yourself at the end of a team by team comparison is after all my responses can the Judge still believe that their impact is realistic or have I done enough to make it so that the judge would have to go through so many logical leaps to still believe their impact so the standard for when you should stop responding to a team kind of subjectively is whether you think that team is still believable after your responses um other times it's more clear so if you think that your material already outweighs them and it's uh you don't feel the need to make them look unbelievable then that's enough so one or two responses might be enough but if the team is very strong then you uh might default to a standard of mitigation rather than believability so if I can't disprove this team completely have I done enough to mitigate their impact to such a point that our impacts are more important than them can I mitigate them enough so that I can outweigh them it's the kind of uh thinking you want to do the second question is is there any guideline regarding when to concentrate on writing the speech uh yeah this is kind of difficult uh I think most of the rip speeches in my experience get written uh unfortunately like very shortly towards the last minutes of the speaker before you what I think you want to do is you want to lay out portions of the speech at the beginning or when you enter the round and then you want to write down a lot of the content of the speech at the last speaker of each team so you'll be writing down a lot at the end of DPM you'll be writing down a lot at the end of DLo because by this point you should have a pretty clear idea of what their the entirety of their case is and how you plan to respond to it similarly you will be writing down a lot by the end of the member speech or the end of the gov web speech because that's when you have the most complete idea of it uh you can also you should also be like listening down little responses and little mechanisms as they come out in the debate but um a lot of the hard part of whipping is multitasking um so okay so someone asked how do you not get thrown off by pois or how do you respond to them confidently uh I think a big tip that people tend to forget is uh just take a pause right you don't have to answer the POI right away you don't have to come up with a Zinger response you can kind of wait for the speaker to keep talking and when you listen to the question often you can just answer it directly I think a lot of teams um or a lot of speakers try to do this thing where if they can't answer the POI they misdirect and they try to bring it up to a different topic and that looks very bad in the eyes of the judge right because it looks like you don't have an answer sometimes I think you can just give a very confident yes or no uh like especially when the pois are like do you support this would you support this or they're trying to get you into all of these little traps just give a little confident yes or no and uh sometimes you might not even want to feel the need to explain yourself I know that sounds really bad but you will do it later on in your speech when you've come up with the answer and when you get back to the material that they're trying to POI to you so when they're trying to bring something up you can give them an answer a short one sentence a short uh one line answered at that point think about it a bit while you're delivering the rest of your speech that you have written down and then coming back to it and kind of reference it this is where I further respond to their Pui this is where I further engage with the material they brought up um so yeah take it slow practice taking pois eventually you get through confidently uh how would you handle note-taking it's always difficult to transfer a note from each of the rest of the three teams to your web on a particular issue within their own uh yeah so this is very much personal preference but the way I do it is I have a separate paper for each of the teams in the round so I have a paper for OG I have a paper for oh oh I have a paper for my team and then I have a paper for the other closing team and I have like a fifth paper where my actual speech is on so I'm taking notes from each team on the paper of that team and then I'm writing it down again or I have like a little Mark or like I'll put a star where I want the response and then I put that start when in the part of my speech where I want it um the other thing is I think you don't have to take note of everything it's a good mind it's good to get in the mindset that you don't have to take note of every little detail or every little mechanism that's coming out of the other team when they have five mechanisms for a point you don't always have to take down those five mechanisms what you want to get is the things I pointed out earlier what is the point they're trying to get to what is the impact they're trying to sell what is their weighing they're providing for this impact and sometimes you can respond to it at that level so you want to take a step back you wanna maybe conceive the mechanisms of the case if they have like so many mechanisms for it you're not going to disprove it anyways you won't have the time and then instead tackle the relevance of the point just explain why it doesn't matter why even with all their mechanisms it's something that happens anyway it's uncomparative Etc um how do you save your team from getting a fourth when you know as a whip that your extension isn't solid and the opening is a good team and already did most of the things needed in the debate this is where you want to pick a team to kill so pick a team either the other opening team or the closing team and respond to the and like give them all of the responses you can give them really frame them as you as irrelevant as possible and I think the other thing to note is what a lot of closing teams don't consider is that responses are considered extension material right it's not always having new substantives or having new arguments per se if you have new responses you have new frames or new ways of seeing a debate that itself is extension material and it can often be very powerful extension material if your work knows how to sell it so you might say something like yes opening provides you with all of the substantive details they give you all of the mechanisms for it but they never explain why this is important or they never explain why this is relevant in comparison to this other thing that came out of the other house and that's where you want to insert yourself uh what's something that you can't ever leave out in your web speech when you're using different speech structures uh three things one never leave out an explanation of why your extension wins so explain what your extension does why it matters and why that's meaning two never leave out responses to the opposite closing team so don't Tunnel Vision on uh just shotgunning responses top half make sure you're engaging with the speaker before you uh and three make sure you secure the validity of your extension so aside from explaining why your extension wins you have to do a little bit of work to explain why your extension is unique so why is it something that's new why is it something that elevates the debate why is it valid um oh okay I'll take like a last few questions so how do you manage open engagement with the op web a preemption especially if the opening half was equally good so sometimes you will be in a very tough situation where both your opening team and your other closing team is very very strong and you will just have to pick one of them to out frame um you'll obviously have to trade off sacrificing one of them over the other but I think the way you make that trade-off is you decide who is easier or who is uh yeah who is easier for the judge to believe that we win it over if it's easier for the judge to believe that you beat your closing half then spend uh then dedicate your resources to taking them out first like if you can respond to them in a short amount of time grade if you need to take four minutes to respond to them but you can convincingly respond to them and make sure they can't take it over you then make sure you do that you want to be secure sometimes you have to whip for security right you you want to minimize the risk you're taking honest with speaker and make sure you take out the people you're sure if you're who you're responding to First um how do you effectively track what other teams are saying I find it difficult to listen and try and write at the same time oh yeah this is definitely a problem I had to it's really difficult to focus in debates at times especially when there's a lot coming out unfortunately I don't think there are many good systems for doing it the first is obviously to practice the more you debate the more you realize that people are following templates uh people are following structures where they highlight what's most important um the other thing is don't be afraid to lean on your partner right after your member has spoken they're not doing anything they might be writing a POI but make sure you take full advantage of them so ask them to write down responses ask them to track the other whip speaker or the other member speaker so you can kind of distribute the work so I think what a lot of teams don't get especially in formats like 3v3 is that listening to another team and like tracking a case should be a team effort it shouldn't just be up to the speaker it should be something that everyone's collaborating on uh what can you do to start learning to multitask if you struggle to do that in a debate room I think this depends a lot on your personal preference but for uh I think the easiest way to do it and the easiest way to practice it is try to be on uh uh try to practice your listening skills so you when you want to practice multitasking you want to practice doing the things independently at first right so you want to practice listening and you want to practice thinking and writing responses or writing your your speech so lots of people get sucked into the part where they practice writing their speech they go into debate round after debate round and they just keep writing things down but the problem isn't in writing their speech the problem is in listening so you might want to step back you might want to try to judge a tournament you might want to try to be an observer for a tournament or watch training round and kind of just focus on the listening to the debate part without the pressure of having to come up with a whip speech or having to come out come up with any speech whatsoever just listen to what you think is important listen to how the speakers are delivering the material and notice what you wouldn't otherwise have noticed in the debate speech um if you're the kind of speaker that records rounds or if your institution like records training rounds one of the things you can do is go into a training round keep your notes from that training round and then after that round is done listen to that round pick up one or look back at your notes and notice what you missed so you can kind of identify the gaps in your listening skills uh this is kind of not a debate related thing so much obviously different speakers will have different ways of doing it I know lots of people like myself or challenge of paying attention uh and it's really difficult to track uh especially when there's so many things going on in the debate when so many things are uh coming up but so I don't want to say that there's a uh one clear way to do it but yeah you practice both sides of it um so last question is there anything specific to avoid doing as a whip that can be very detrimental to your bench uh yeah I think there's a couple of things the first is don't lie about what another team is running or don't lie about another team's case uh a lot of web speakers uh I don't want to say do it maliciously but do it because they're a little bit afraid of taking on the material head-on so instead of engaging with an actual argument that the team raised they'll kind of come up with a straw man or they'll kind of like discredit teams unfairly especially when they deal with their own top half right so a lot of web speakers especially when you uh you're transitioning from being a novice we'll just lie about what their top have presented they'll be like uh top half didn't say this they didn't say this they didn't have any mechanisms for their arguments they didn't have any impacts and it just gets to the point where it's so obviously false or it's so obviously disingenuous that no judge is going to believe you and as a result The credibility of your extension and The credibility of your case as a whole kind of become less believable so don't lie don't misrecept represent other teams engage with them fairly take on their material fairly if you don't understand completely what they're saying flag that like be honest like the their argument wasn't clear to me or it didn't make sense to me but this is what I got from them this is the impact I heard from them or maybe the fact that it didn't make sense to you is something that you can call out it is a detriment so they lack Clarity you're just not sure what impacts they're going for be honest with what your thought process is be honest with how you're appraising other teams and and like don't lie or don't make up mechanisms for them uh okay it's 808 we went a little bit over time so I think I'd have to end the talk here thank you so much to everyone who dropped by thank you for all the wonderful questions again hope to see you guys at sundo it's going to be a very fun tournament uh we also have more workshops in store from OC and other members of The Edge core on other very interesting topics so hopefully we see you guys there thanks everyone