5:45 - Think you can remember every argument in a debate? Think again! This episode of Professor Graham's ABCs of Debate is a game-changer for anyone serious about debating. Professor Graham tackles the essential but often neglected skill of FLOWING—effective note-taking that ensures you keep track of every argument, statistic, and piece of data. Joined by his insightful co-host Kevin, the good professor debunks the myths that you can rely solely on memory or pre-written blocks, and instead, he reveals why having an organized and accurate record is the cornerstone of a successful debate.
5:45 - Think you can remember every argument in a debate? Think again! This episode of Professor Graham's ABCs of Debate is a game-changer for anyone serious about debating. Professor Graham tackles the essential but often neglected skill of FLOWING—effective note-taking that ensures you keep track of every argument, statistic, and piece of data. Joined by his insightful co-host Kevin, the good professor debunks the myths that you can rely solely on memory or pre-written blocks, and instead, he reveals why having an organized and accurate record is the cornerstone of a successful debate.
Hello everybody and welcome back to another episode of Professor Graham's ABCs of Debate. I'm Professor Graham, here with my pal Kevin, and today the word of the day is going to be flowing, so, without further ado, let's jump into it. It's funny that this word is so far down the list for, quite literally, being the most important fundamental skill for doing debate. Flowing, in essence, is just glorified note-taking of the arguments that are being said in round. Why is it called flowing? I don't know the history, nor does it matter, so instead we're just going to talk about why you do it and how to do so effectively. This may seem like the silliest question I've ever had to rhetorically ask into the void, but why should you take notes on the debate round? Surely I'll be able to remember everything they said, or I'll just copy blocks from all my files and not have to write down a single word because I've already made my speech. If you sound like this, you're throwing.
Adrian Graham:
Well that doesn't seem very nice, professor. Oh hi, kevin, I didn't realize that you liked throwing too. All jokes aside.
Adrian Graham:
Flowing is literally the cornerstone of debate, because if you don't have an accurate record of what's going on in the round, then how are you supposed to debate? First and foremost, saying that you can remember everything is just plain wrong. People make literally hundreds of arguments and assertions, backed up by an assortment of qualified people who advance multiple arguments of their own, citing specific examples, statistics and data. So every time you look me in the eyes and tell me that you just, quote-unquote, remembered all that, I just know that you're wrong. That's especially true because let's even give you the benefit of the doubt You're Jimmy Neutron boy genius and you remember everything they said.
Adrian Graham:
Well, guess what? You probably don't remember the exact order of those arguments. So even in this hypothetical scenario where you remember every single detail about everything they said, your speech is still going to be a disorganized mess. I also think that the other argument that you're just copying and pasting blocks to answer things so why would you flow is at least pretending to be a good argument. Realistically, though, even if you're copying over blocks, you're still missing huge chunks of the specifics of their argument that writing notes can fix. Not to mention that if you're in a partner event, having another accurate record of the round will help you fill in holes of arguments you could have potentially missed.
Kevin:
Okay, jeez, I guess I'll just start flowing on my computer then.
Adrian Graham:
Kevin, don't you dare touch that laptop. Sorry, I got a little heated there. Flowing on your computer is viable for some, and I'm not here to take away accessibility for those that think it's a better system for them. However, if you've always flowed on the computer or aren't sold either way, or even just a computer person, I'd say at least give some of these flowing tips a shot. I promise they're useful and I double promise that they're effective. Tip number one Get a new sheet of paper for every new position. For example, each contention or off-case position should be its own piece of paper.
Kevin:
Maybe use half a sheet of paper every round. What are you on about?
Adrian Graham:
That's fair, kevin, and I ain't calling you out for not flowing, but Well, you're probably not flowing. Something that will become obscenely apparent later is that you need a lot of space as the debate goes on. Even if some pages go underdeveloped because you or your opponents don't make a ton of arguments there, there most certainly will be some arguments that are debated a lot more. In those instances, you need to make sure that you have adequate space, and it's always better to have more available space than necessary than to randomly run out. This means that every contention, no matter how big or small, should receive its own sheet of paper so you can have adequate space to write down all of your potential responses and all of your opponent's responses to your responses, and so on.
Adrian Graham:
Tip number two Use legal-sized paper. This isn't meant to be gatekeeping. If you hate legal-sized paper, that's great. Use whatever makes you happy. However, this one is mostly just a quality of life suggestion. Yellow legal pad paper is personally harder for me to read off of, because the contrast is just a little bit weird, and normal printer paper just tends to not have sufficient space to write arguments. So for my money, I'd say use the good stuff, make your life easier.
Adrian Graham:
Tip number three start low when flowing on paper. For some reason, people in debate love reading their overviews like it's literally their favorite pastime. Because of this again, you need to be ready to have enough space to cover everything they could say On printer-sized paper. You probably want to start about one half of the way down on the page, and if you're using legal-sized paper, like you, should be about one third of the way down. This gives sufficient space to allow for ginormous overviews, usually prevalent in less technical k-debates, or absurdly long da overviews that just love reading extra impacts. Tip number four have tight horizontal spacing. This one is certainly most applicable to policy and pf formats, where there are quite literally eight speeches to potentially have flowed on your single sheet of paper. Thus, the rule of thumb for this one is to keep everything in columns, about the size of the distance from the tip of your thumb to the first knuckle. This way you keep your flow horizontally tight, keeping your arguments condensed and leaving space for the rest of the debate.
Kevin:
Well, why don't I just fold my paper into eights?
Adrian Graham:
That's not a terrible question, kevin. It's horrible. Obviously, having a paper folded into eighths is the worst thing imaginable. Imagine you're handling 12 sheets of paper in a round, and that's already so much, but now imagine all of them are folded into eighths, because you hate yourself or something. Don't do that.
Adrian Graham:
Additionally, it's important that you do permit yourself some flexibility. There's times, like your final rebuttal, where you need to make things visibly bigger or draw lines or for a lack of a better term. You just need some space to cook. So allow yourself to have that flexibility to do so and leave yourself some space. Tip number five have enough vertical spacing. The flip side of keeping things tight horizontally is that you need to leave space for arguments to develop throughout the debate. Also, debate tends to get bigger in the middle as people pick and choose what arguments they want to get deeper on, and especially in policy and LD, where the negative literally has a disproportionate amount of time in the middle of the debate. Because of this, you need to leave space, assuming that your opponents could dig deeper on certain arguments.
Kevin:
Typically, you want about three fingers worth of space between each new argument your opponents made earlier on to give enough space.
Adrian Graham:
I don't want to be attractive brah. These are all really simple steps individually, but I understand that they can be overwhelming at first. I think just looking at examples really shows how simple this is, incorporating all the steps. But if my terrible MS Paint drawings aren't enough, I also went ahead and linked a far better explanation of this on the Wyoming Debate Roundup website. There's 100% less me there, but there's also about 300% more in-depth explanations of all these topics and it'll certainly be a lot more useful and I think that just about does it for learning how to flow. Any thoughts, kevin?
Kevin:
Well, after all that, I think that flowing will be much easier.
Adrian Graham:
Easier. I hardly know her. Hey, thanks again for watching today's episode of Professor Graham's ABCs of Debate. As always, I'm Professor Graham and that's my pal Kevin. Yeah, if you ever need any help with debate stuff at all, my email should be right up here. Just make sure you CC your coach. I'll get back to you as soon as I possibly can. If I need debate tips that you might need, I'll drop that knowledge on you.