Method

Hey, everybody. It's James here again. Just back with another short video, and this video is on method. It's a question that I get asked a lot and Jules gets asked a lot in terms of, How do I improve my method? What is method and what function does it play in terms of determining a winner in debate? And how important is it? For those of you that are new to debating method is a really important yet fairly simple concept, and that is method is the form and the structure of debate overall.

So it can be broken down into two different components. The first one is your team method, which is what your team does just as a whole to construct its case. And the second one is the individual method that you use, and that is each speaker in the way that they present their arguments throughout the debate itself. It's important to remember that best practice adjudication for debate doesn't actually put a focus on scoring method or a tick box approach to method. So if you don't get all of these elements right all the time, it doesn't mean you automatically lose a debate. It just means you had some tools that you probably didn't use, that you probably could have used in order to make your debate better. So hopefully that acts as a decent definition. It's one of those three core components of debate that is that we've got method, we've got matter and we've got matter. Matter being the most important, the stuff you say, manner being the way that you speak, and method being this one structure and form.

Okay, cool. So method's really important, particularly for younger debaters and those new to the craft and that basically is important. The same as anything that you learn, which is like, if you were learning a musical instrument, you'd want to learn how to read music and you want to understand a little bit about music before you just went in to did your horn, so to speak. So I think it's really important to have a focus, a strong focus on method, particularly in the early years, and that can be using scaffolds and using sentences that help people, particularly younger debaters, get a start on how to make their arguments. I suggest some of those for you later in the video, but it's important to realise that it has its place, but it also can be one of those things that becomes slightly restricting as you get older and as you get more experienced in debates. So I'll talk to you a little bit about that as well.

So as a general rule, before I give you some examples of different types of method, just keep this in mind—method is something that enables your case to be better through structure. Okay. It doesn't mean you've got the best case because you are structured. It means that you had a tool, you employed it well, and then that helped you make better arguments. And that's true of both your team method. Those are all the fancy debating different things that we do as well as your own personal method that is sticking to your PEEL script or your OREO script, or if you use our methodology, your APES idea in order to try and make sure that you've proved an idea to the best of your ability. So it is not an instant win if you've got method and someone else doesn't have method, but it obviously goes a long way to improving your arguments when they're just tighter, when they're cleaner, when they're better structured.

All right. So I'm going to have a look firstly at team method, and I flagged this as the things that we do as a team in order to communicate our ideas to the best of our ability. And I'm just going to pick out a couple of common terms that you might see in terms of method and explain them and then just give you some best practice examples that you can employ in your debates.

So the first one is allocation. So an allocation is just allotting arguments or giving arguments to particular speakers. We're going to do this anyway. Let's be real. Like, we're going to make sure that our first and our second speaker have a certain amount of arguments. So that's fine. But it's important to also realise that the people that haven't been in prep with you don't know what those arguments are. So it's important for a first speak of both the affirmative and the negative team to actually get out there and say, “Look, as first speaker, I'm going to talk to you about this, this and this, and my second speaker is going to talk to you about this.”

Okay. So we want to keep those argument headings nice and snappy. We want to keep them very short. But we just want to give the audience a bit of an idea as to what's coming in the debate. And most importantly, you know, that critical member of the audience, that is the adjudicator that's sitting there going, “Oh yeah, those are cool ideas. I'm looking forward to hearing those take play in the debate itself.”

So allocations don't need to be long. They can be pretty short. And I actually suggest that you are pretty short with them. And it's just about giving some headings to adjudicators and the audience member to keep them engaged and to make sure that we know if you've missed anything or if you wanted to talk about things and you didn't get the time to do that, that an allocation is a great way of signalling that that's to come in the debate.

Okay, the next thing we're going to have a look at and it's pretty important is the role of a definition in a debate and to some extent the role of what we call a model. There's going to be more videos on definitions and models. But just in brief, a definition is important in a debate in order to establish a set of working rules for how the debate is going to proceed. Okay, That means that we have words that are less ambiguous when they are defined well. That does not mean use a dictionary to define words that we already know what they mean.

It's important to make sure that your definition adds to the debate and generally speaking, that it gives us some value so that both teams are talking about the right stuff. Because there's nothing worse, to be clear, than a debate about what the meaning of something is, rather than talking about what the ideas are in the actual debate itself.

As part of that definition, we've got this really important word, which is a model. A model is your policy for how you're going to change something or how you're going to alter something in society. And it's best described as a plan. It's just like, this is how we're going to put our plan forward for our action. So I talk to you in another video about mechanisms that a mechanism tells you what you should be doing right? And then your plan is the steps that you're taking in order to get that mechanism to work right.

So a model doesn't need to be particularly complex. It just needs to say, here are the things that we think are going to happen with the way that we plan this out. This is particularly important, of course, from the affirmative side. It's also important the negative listens to it. And there may be some room for things that we call counter models on the negative, but I'm going to deal with those at another point in time.

Just keep in mind that generally speaking, the first affirmative speaker introducing a model for how you're going to change something is an important thing that will be in a different video. Go watch that.

In terms of the last one that I'm going to cover, it's going to be called signposting. Signposting is just such a simple idea, but it's so, so critical. It's so, so important. It basically says, “Hey, I'm up to here. I'm going to go do this now.” So it goes like, “My first argument is about to come and it's about this.” Or “My second argument is coming. Now it's about this.” Okay? So it's about leading us through the speech by telling us where you're up to and what's coming next. So allocation is a form of a big signpost saying, “Look, here's my first, second and third argument,” but there's little signposts that go along the way saying, “Oh, my next point is coming up,” orA “n example of this is X,” and that's important so that two things are true. The first one is your brain like figures out where you're going and what you're doing when you're speaking. And the second one is that we allow for the audience and for the adjudicator to understand where you're going as well.

All right. So a couple of quick notes on individual method. I mentioned this earlier, but that is your own internal speech structure. And your internal speech structure gives you consistency. Make sure that you're making your arguments in the best way possible. We're going to do a lot more on this, but suffice to say, most arguments in order to make them well require some form of proof, require some kind of example, and definitely require analysis. So with those three things, we know that all of our arguments are consistent. Again, you can signpost and say, “Hey, this is my arguments heading, this is my arguments example. This is my analysis of that argument and my comparison of that argument.” So that's important for you to use both signposting and your own individual structure to keep your ideas consistent and to keep them flowing nicely for the debate itself.

The final thing to say here is let's have a look at one of my least favorite parts of method, and that is a case line. So a case line is an old kind of concept that was used in debating back in the 1990s and the 2000. That basically is a little catch phrase that we use to tie our ideas together. I'm very anti- case line personally. You don't lose marks for having it. You don't gain marks for having it. It's just something that it will eventually kind of die out. The idea was that it tied our arguments together, but the problem was that it became really repetitious and it became more of a catchphrase or a slogan. They’re not particularly helpful. And they definitely can confuse young debaters. So I'm anti- case line. Some adjudicators approach those adjudicators, probably tend to be ones that haven't had that much experience with, you know, the up-to-date best practice forms of adjudication so that probably it's probably like the least relevant form of method.

But that's method in a nutshell. Two things take away from this video. Firstly, make sure you concentrate on method. If you are just learning how to debate, but it's important to internalize that structure and really get it, you know, inside yourself so that you can go, Yeah, I'm ticking all my boxes that I need to do. But secondly, that method is only there to enable you to make better arguments. Okay? It's not there to win debates. It's there as a tool to help you function better and your team function better with what they're about to say.

And that's it for me today, guys, and hope to speak to you soon. Cheers.