We fly around the country to compete in front of strangers for recognition from our insular community. We’re even willing to pay to give up our weekends in an effort to win that recognition – and sometimes win a little hardware too. We have opinions about good judging and bad judging and we try to adapt and accommodate all types of judges. We root for our teams. We root for other teams. We watch the best teams and we revel in good argumentation. Debate is as much a lifestyle as it is an activity because of these shared community practices and norms. I’ll say that again: these practices make debate a lifestyle. None of examples listed above are specific to one type of debate. They’re as true for Public Forum Debate as they are for Policy Debate, and are only a small snapshot of the overlap between the two debate events. But despite the undeniable overlap between PF and Policy, the two schools of debate find themselves at odds more often than not. As a coach of both high school Public Forum and high school Policy Debate, I find that debaters are more interested in focusing on the differences between events than on the similarities. I noticed an extreme version of this conflict while watching the live feed of the National Debate Tournament, which is the college version of the Tournament of Champions. I watched as Policy Debaters and Public Forum Debaters traded barbs in the comment section for the three hours between the round's end and the panel decision. Public Forum Debaters largely criticized Policy for two conventions; spreading and kritiks. In my eyes, both of those criticisms are misguided because they rely on misconceptions of Policy Debate. These misconceptions also treat arguments and argument styles that pervade Policy Debate’s fringe as representative of the whole. Such a perspective misses the vast majority of Policy Debate argument and scholarship, and with that misses a substantial benefit that Public Forum Debaters can take from learning about the techniques, structures, and concepts of Policy Debate. Many of these concepts have already made their way into Public Forum, for the better (the explosion of framework debate, debates over definitions and the scope of topics, and the explanation of burdens for one or both sides are widely recognizable examples). This post is not an advocacy for turning Public Forum into Policy Lite - far from it. Policy has undesirable elements as well as desirable ones; the aim of this post is to distill the best practices of Policy Debate and examine the application of those best practices to Public Forum Debate topics, competitions, and audiences.

Though there’s room to discuss the misconceptions that pervade the Policy community about Public Forum, this post will focus on the ways in which Public Forum stigmatizes Policy, and then will examine benefits that can result from studying Policy for Public Forum Debaters who are willing to look past those stereotypes. The stereotypes and stigmas surrounding spreading and the kritik are both misguided, and this post will address each in turn. I write to debunk these criticisms for several reasons. I find the perceived gap between Public Forum and Policy communities ridiculous. It’s ridiculous because fundamentally, we’re all nerds and the disagreement over event minutiae is like a fight to be top nerd. That fight is especially arbitrary and insignificant when compared to non-debaters who spend their weekends...not at debate tournaments. As someone who has successfully done both Public Forum and Policy, I can comfortably say both have benefits and drawbacks and preference for one over the other largely amounts to taste because of the overlap between events.

For example, both Public Forum Debate and Policy Debate "spread" relative to laypeople. Spreading isn’t a yes/no question; it’s a style of speaking that is faster than the average layperson’s style of speaking, and debaters from both events regularly speak faster than the average layperson, albeit to different degrees. Determining permissible speech speed is complicated and defining the line for "too fast" usually amounts to "I know it when I see it" – a self-serving, subjective standard that makes criticism entirely arbitrary. The same is true of kritiks. Because kritiks vary radically in style, substance, and construction as well as philosophical literature base, the definition of "kritik" is also complicated. The majority of kritiks tend to attack the philosophical underpinnings of a case in some way. They draw from various, radically different schools of thought, examples of which include: Enlightenment philosophers like John Locke and Violet Ketels; utilitarians like Peter Singer and Joseph Nye; deontological theorists like Daniel Callahan and Alan Gewirth; economic structuralists like Louis Althusser and Robert Young; feminist poststructuralists like Judith Butler and Anne Fausto-Sterling; afro-pessimist theorists like Frank Wilderson and Jared Sexton and postmodernists like Michel Foucault and Friedreich Nietzsche. Public Forum Debaters are not and should not be strangers to philosophically driven arguments. While some of the above schools of thought have yet to appear, many others have been long-standing staples of Public Forum Debate. Lockean social contract theory was a prominent affirmative on the 2009 NCFL topic. Utilitarianism and deontological frameworks have been long-standing methods of evaluating impacts, which become especially prominent on topics that pit human rights against security (such as the November 2013 NSA Surveillance topic, and it’s predecessors). Poststructural feminists who analyze the intersection of gendered biology and culture were core literature on the March 2014 gender topic. Even postmodernists like Foucault made an appearance on the negative for the 2008 NCFL healthcare topic, and for the 2011 February topic about Wikileaks and the surveillance state. Though it is clear that Public Forum Debaters do not identically discuss and analyze philosophers, the days where philosophy has no role in Public Forum Debate are long gone. That’s especially true because studying philosophy can sharpen critical thinking skills and broaden argumentative perspective, which are important traits for all debate events. Because the borders of argumentation and argument style are porous, there is no intellectually sound hard-and-fast line that can be drawn to distinguish Policy Debate from Public Forum Debate. But even if such a line could be drawn coherently, it is unstrategic for Public Forum Debaters to do so because the scholarship generated by Policy Debate has a lot to offer other events, including Public Forum. There are three main ways I see Policy Debate’s scholarship benefiting Public Forum Debaters; from Policy’s argument structure, tactics and techniques, and from the wealth of pre-cut evidence generated by Policy Debate. In the following section, I’ll list a few examples of both.

Policy Debate has a unique method of categorizing types of arguments and examining the components required to make each argument. I won’t rehash the ways in which Policy Debaters have – over the course of decades – theorized the explanation of opportunity cost and disadvantages, but I will provide several links to resources which debaters can use to better their debate skills, especially in the off-season. Link 1: http://commfaculty.fullerton.edu/jbruschke/debate_bible.htm Dr. Jon Bruschke, director of debate from California State University, wrote an excellent introduction to Policy Debate’s basic concepts. Some of them are specific to Policy, but the vast majority have application to debate writ large. Link 2: http://www.scribd.com/doc/8035628/Emory-Policy-Debate-Manual Emory’s Debate Squad has a famous manual for introducing Policy Debate to first year students. It introduces basic Policy concepts as well as tactics effectively associated with those concepts. It was written in the 1990s, and hasn’t aged perfectly – it’s got some dated assumptions and even more dated Microsoft Word Clipart. Nonetheless, it’s a good foundation. Link 3: http://sdiencyclopedia.wikispaces.com/ This wiki, put together by the Spartan Debate Institute, defines commonly used terms that you may encounter in the literature. Some wiki definition pages are better developed than others; so if you’re confused, don’t stop there. Link 4: http://www.cedadebate.org/CAD/index.php/CAD Contemporary Argumentation and Debate is an academic journal that analyzes debate trends and rhetoric studies – ridiculously cool stuff there. The archives go all the way back to 1980 and chronicle some of the biggest debates in…well…debate history. Link 5: http://groups.wfu.edu/debate/MiscSites/DRGArticles/DRGArtiarticlesIndex.htm These articles, written by various famous debate minds, are similar to the articles found in CAD. They’re a little less formal but no less valuable – and many of them debate each other on issues of debate theory. Link 6: http://www.debatecoaches.org/openev-archive/files/download/9_cardcutting_basics.pptx This powerpoint, by Dr. Jennifer Heidt, describes some of the best practices for acquiring and organizing evidence to use. This evidence style – called cutting "cards" as a throwback to when evidence was printed on notecards – is extremely efficient. Link 7: http://tinyurl.com/HowToCutCards The link was a little long, so I shortened it. I included this evidence guide, written by the University of Miami’s debate team, because it also includes an extensive list of resources where you can find evidence. It also goes a little deeper into specific card-cutting tips. Link 8: http://www.debatecoaches.org/resources/open-evidence-project/ This website is a debater’s best friend. Every summer, over a dozen debate camps produce thousands of pages of evidence about the Policy Debate topic and then publish that evidence for free on this website. Not all of the evidence is topic specific; for example, evidence discussing the dangers of terrorism applies generally to a broad swath of topics. The evidence is broken down by type and by producing institution, and can cut down hundreds of hours of research for a debater. It’s also backdated – evidence from previous years is also freely available – which means that this website gives you access to literally hundreds of thousands of hours of debate work product.

This may seem like a lot of information to digest at once, which is why high school Policy Debate has a forum where you can ask clarification questions and discuss debate generally: www.cross-x.com. Public Forum had a similar forum years ago, but it shut down after the forum’s owner, Bob Jordan, passed away. Cross-X has a variety of sub-forums including one dedicated to Public Forum Debate! Check that forum out if you have any questions or simply want to kill time. And remember: debate is debate, no matter its name.