Talk:Policy debate

Grammar Changes?
I changed the phrase "The high school resolution will be" to "The high school resolution is" - the debate season is happening now. I don't like being accused of being non-constructive when I make such a minor change - and when it improves the article.

Merger proposals
Merge Negative (policy debate) and Affirmative (policy debate) stub articles here. They are dead-end stubs, and it's silly to have them over there when they better serve the reader over here, in this article. Discussion here. GenQuest "Talk to Me" 18:00, 3 April 2014 (UTC) Merged boldly Kharkiv07  ( T ) 17:49, 25 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Support the proposed redirects per nom. Since it's been five months since you first proposed the move and nobody has objected, User:GenQuest, so you can be bold and consider it a non-controversial change.  Andrew327 18:42, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

Spreading
The article claims, without a source, that "spreading" is a contraction of "speed reading". To my knowledge that is false. For one thing, while speaking very fast can have as its purpose the introduction of a lot of evidence or the presentation of a complex argument on a single point, "spreading" refers specifically to the presentation of a large number of arguments, not necessarily good ones, in the hope that the opposing team will fail to respond to one or more of them. The reference is to "spreading the opposition too thin". I know this from my own time as a debater but surely this must be discussed in a written source somewhere.Bill (talk) 03:33, 16 September 2015 (UTC)


 * Agreed, that the etymology of "spreading" needs to be clarified and sourced. Additionally I would like to see a section on the history of spreading since it was not always part of the Policy Debate format. When did it start (and by this I mean when did it first come into competition as a strategy and also when was the slang term first recognized? I asked the debate professor at my college and he said as far as he knew (by anecdote) this was all started by a high-school student who deduced (A) that there were no rules on speaking speed and further deduced that (B) if he only spoke a little faster than was normal he would overwhelm his opponent in quantity of arguments. In short, he broke no rules but he "gamed" the system. Other students copied his strategy and the whole damn thing snowballed, with students speaking faster and faster just to keep up. An arms race of speed if you will.


 * Along the way some of the core elements of good speaking (eye contact, facial expressions, tone, etc) were sacrificed and audiences dwindled (Mom and Dad stopped coming to hear Johnny speak since none of it made sense to their ears). Very sad. 172.88.134.126 (talk) 13:36, 27 August 2016 (UTC)

External links modified
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External links modified
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 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20051201083247/http://cat.sckans.edu/frederick_debate/history.htm to http://cat.sckans.edu/frederick_debate/history.htm
 * Replaced archive link http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:x87NQ0qbOpwJ:debate.uvm.edu/NFL/rostrumlib/GlassMar%2700.pdf+David+Glass+critique+policy+debate&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1 with https://web.archive.org/web/20160303231602/http://debate.uvm.edu/NFL/rostrumlib/GlassMar'00.pdf on http://debate.uvm.edu/NFL/rostrumlib/GlassMar%2700.pdf
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Policy and Biometrics
J have been agonising over a way to ensure a Policy for every website that needs a Policy and I cannot find a truthful way to ensure a Privacy Policy that works with Biometrics, its just not possible. Not at all. Wikinicole23 (talk) 18:43, 1 March 2021 (UTC)