Part 5: End
Conclusion
So we’ve gone through every part of what makes a good debater. Charisma, sound, organization, micro-argumentation, macro-argumentation, research, argument resolution, and strategy. I guess that’s all there is in terms of content to cover. The only thing left to discuss is how to master all of these things.
I raised a question at the beginning that most people have which is: how many hours will it actually take to get good at debate? When I started writing this I didn’t have a good answer, but I have a better idea of it now. Obviously, a lot of it depends on how much of the time you invest is productive (as opposed to unproductive), but I do have a more clear answer. My belief is that 100 GM-directed coach hours are enough for you to progress from one level to the next. In other words, it takes about 75-100 GM-directed coach hours for someone to go from unaware to beginner circuit, beginner circuit to 2-4, 2-4 to strong 3-3, strong 3-3 to 4-2/break, break to bid round, bid round to high chance of bidding, etc.
Quality of work goes down when you’re without a GM-approved plan, a coach, active engagement in your work, a good mood, or consistency. Without a GM-approved plan, it’s hard to know if you’re tackling the thing that returns the greatest marginal improvement. Without a coach, you have to use your own intuition to catch mistakes, rather than an expert’s. Without active engagement, it’s hard to get much out of your work; passivity usually fails in the long run in this game. Without a good mood, you’ll get less out of practice and be less interested in the activity, which can only hurt your understanding of the general nature of the activity. Without consistency, it’s hard to improve, and you’ll have to invest comparatively more time than if you just set aside a bit of time each day to practice.
The conclusion here is that debate is not that hard of an activity to succeed at on the national level, even if you’re starting the activity after your freshman year of high school.
So I’ve answered the question of how much work is needed to get good at debate, which is the motivating question for this entire project.
Let’s try to make this conclusion concrete.
The conclusion is that it’s not too late. A lot of people (novice me included) have/had this secret fear that they started debate too late and thus won’t have enough time to get good enough to “make it.” This is bullshit. Debate is not like many other activities (e.g. gymnastics, soccer). It does not require commitment to start as a toddler. You can join debate at the beginning of high school, put an hour or two a day into the activity, and be remarkably better than everyone else by the end of your sophomore year.
I started circuit debate in my sophomore year. Looking back, I wasted most of the time I spent “practicing” debate early on doing irrelevant preparation and I still managed to do well by the end. My firm belief is that most people could theoretically start debate as late as summer (or maybe even winter) of junior year and still be extremely successful.
The reason I say this is because much of my improvement happened after the winter of my junior year. That was when I started working intensively with my mentor Paras Kumar, owner of DebateDrills.