I am in the process of cleaning out my apartment, which honestly I have never done, or perhaps never done well. I kept a lot of junk. Not sure why I have so much, but I think that’s what happens to you through living.

I have been digging around for some paper copies of materials I used to teach a form of debate called Irish Times Format, or “Times debating,” or “Irish debate.” In that process I found a wealth of old debate material, including one that has nothing to do with Irish debating at all, but really struck a chord. Once I realized what it was, I was transported back to that debate, 1999, somewhere in Austin, Texas.

I was judging a high school policy debate round, known in some parts of the U.S. as “Cross-Examination Debate” (a historical hold-out from the old arguments that split the NDT around 1982 and created a new organization called CEDA – the Cross Examination Debate Association). One of the members of the team walked around the semifinal room and handed out green slips of paper to everyone before the debate started, saying nothing except, “Does everyone have one?” and making sure to catch everyone who came in a bit late.

It was a powerful document, so powerful that it shaped our perception of what was being said in the debate. Once you are handed something, you generally read it. This conducted a sense of familiarity and urgency to us about the issues that were going to come up in that debate. The other team had no such contextualization, and also had to fight against the immediacy that the green slips continued to convey about the issue for the duration of the debate.

I still have mine. I kept it, as it was one of the most unique moments of argumentation I’ve experienced in a tournament debate.

I’ve zoomed in on it a bit so you can read the smaller print text. I think it’s from 1999, but not quite sure about that. I remember the room and the debate team that handed it to me. But other than that, this is really my only reccolection is this handout.

This moment stands out because it is the sort of rhetorical innovation in debating that should be a regular occurrence in debate education. However, debate education focuses on the edges of the rules and the denotation of proceedure in order to generate strategy. Any innovation is going to be kept to and within the margins of the rules.

Are there rules against handouts? None of us were sure, but it didn’t matter. This was done before the debate started when everyone was assembling to watch it. It was never referred to in any speech by the team that distributed it. It was not used as evidence during the debate. It was the perfect demonstration, in my mind, of how to connect the limitations of tournament debating with the nearly borderless world of debate.

How can debate coaches and rhetoric educators encourage this kind of invention? How can this become a norm, not an exception that stands out across 20 years of listening to and evaluating various debate contests?

Part of the solution is removing pedagogy from the drive to win the tournament. Reversing the relationship between strategies and the winning of the round or ballot is essential. Most of the time, arguments and strategies are developed in order to win debates. Consider developing arguments and strategies that you think are powerful, meaningful, important interventions in the world. Deploy them and reflect on the win or loss, or the comments and discussion after the debate as review of your argument. Make changes as needed to compensate for the position’s failure (or success that is less than you hoped). Repeat.

Using the debate tournament like an exam or the dreaded higher education word “assessment” is the clearest path to redeeming the weekend tournament. It won’t fully redeem what goes on there, but it’s a step toward the kind of innovation in argumentation that we’d expect to get from such a vast investment of time and other resources into tournament oriented debate practice.