Recently gave me the tiniest of glimpses into the world of competitive policy debate and oh wow I am still a naive idiot about this subculture but I am SO! FASCINATED!
First! Some of them make arguments at ~six trillion WPM?? Please listen:
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These arguments draw on huge libraries of cards which they prepare in advance, individually summarizing various speeches, policy documents, positions, etc! Teams use these plastic tubs to transport these papers b/c they maximize checked baggage volume! nytimes.com/2010/04/18/edu
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They "cut" 1000s of these cards by using a multi-level scale of underlining, bolding, highlighting, font size, etc to make the key points of a primary source rapidly visible on the page! There are plugins for word processors to help do this more quickly! chrome.google.com/webstore/detai
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The highlighting technique makes me wonder whether some of How to Read a Book's approach could be executed this way, surfacing the text's structural skeleton through levels of inline markup, rather than by making a parallel summarizing outline. I'll need to try these plugins!
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Also: any claims one team makes which aren't specifically refuted by the opposing team are taken to be true! The fast-talkers are fast-talking to make as many claims as possible—and the opposing team has to track and then refute each one!
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I still don't understand anything that's going on when I watch one of these things, but I'm totally fascinated and impressed! (And my apologies, , for my inevitable butchery of what you described)
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I also highly recommend this Radiolab episode: wnycstudios.org/story/debatable
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Wow! should hire this guy to read their credits! Amy's great at it, but this guy is supersonic 😋 cc
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