The Nile Blog.
Free debate strategy, tournament prep, and coaching wisdom from champions. New posts every week! Always free!
The role and limitations of stock issues - by Victor Joecks
The first insight is that every Team Policy debate round contains two separate debates. The first is on whether...
The Art of Round Vision - Mark Roose
In essence, round vision is what the name describes, a view of the round as a whole. Round...
How to Argue Significance Effectively - Mark Roose
In my first three years of debate, I thought significance was a useless stock issue. I went so...
Why Good Cases Lose in Elimination Rounds - Mark Roose
What is the difference between Affirmative cases that win locally and those that win NITOC? The real question...
Cross Examination Tips
By Nathan Chen Cross examination is one of your most powerful weapons in your arsenal. Yet debaters...
Speaker Positions
Every single year, my partner for that year and I made an unconventional decision: to swap speaker positions...
Parli: Advanced Fundamentals
‘Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well’ -- John Gardner. We’re all waiting for the one ground-breaking nugget that will...
You've Been Emphasizing the Wrong Impact This Whole Time
By Coach Joshua Spivey Have a disproportionate win rate on aff or neg? Most people do. Want...
Stop Using Time-Wasters
By Coach Joshua Spivey You’ve been preparing and strategizing against this case for hours upon hours….Maybe it’s dredging,...
Solving All Your 1AC Problems in Under 3 Minutes
Coach Mark Roose In this short blog, I am going to show you how to solve all...
Squirrels Aren't Competitive
By Coach Brad Tomasovic We were living in dread. My partner and I had been running the same...
Fixing Cross-Ex: Part One
By Coach Jackson Earnest One of the most frustrating experiences a debater can have is dealing with a...
Lacking Ethos, Pathos, or Logos?
We’ve all had that feeling. Finding out that you lost a round that you had in the bag! You had...
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