Argument Construction Workshop

Each year, thousands upon thousands of pages of briefs are prepared at Institutes across the nation on the various subtopics relevant to the national debate proposition. Many times, students gain access to blocks produced at the various Institutes from friends and colleagues who attended alternative programs. Not only do most Institute blocks suffer from the aforementioned redundancy, they are also often limited in utility: tags are too long or too short, evidence is of relatively weak quality, and many files lack strategic coherence.

To combat these problems, we offer The Argument Construction Workshop. This phase is introduced by instruction in the mechanics and subtleties of writing high-quality arguments. The section includes suggestions from the entire staff concerning ways to organize evidence for sorting, means of devising the most useful labels, and how to organize arguments into a coherent set of usable blocks. The research team instructor closely supervises the argument construction phase.

Argument Construction has as its objective the production of a high quality product that can be useful as both a tool and a model for students once they return home. At Northwestern, our goal is to provide you with the set of blocks that you wish to keep, the ones into which you integrate the work that others send you from competing Institutes.

Skills Workshop

Northwestern Debate Institute’s commitment to teaching advanced debate skills will be of tremendous future use to debaters. No other workshop offers this significant combination of intensive training in analysis, rebuttal, refutation, delivery, persuasion, and crossexamination skills. We guarantee students a minimum of 20 critiqued debates on the upcoming debate resolution, as well as time to rework speeches from the practice debates. One former student commented, “I am coming out of here a much better debater than I came in.”

The Skills Workshop includes two components particularly unique to the Northwestern Debate Institute. First, students are exposed to a number of model minidebates designed to hi-light clear and persuasive presentation of a number of argument types and strategies about which they will need to be familiar: topicality arguments, political capital disadvantages, case turn strategies, kritiks, and theory arguments. These demonstration mini-debates, executed by experienced speakers, presented in a slow and concise manner, provide students with a model from which to improve their own presentations.

Second, the Skills Workshop completes the process of argument integration by providing detailed attention to the ways in which various argument types are effectively presented. For instance, along with the Political Capital Mini-Debates comes commentary and discussion of the objectives of such an argument, its strengths and weaknesses, and the various nuances required for its effective execution.