Resources

This page contains a number of resources that might be useful to debaters and those who want to learn more about debate.

In the sidebar, at right is a column entitled Debate 101. In this area you will find videos from debate experts that will help introduce the basic terms and mechanics of debate. Think of it as an introduction for beginners.

Other recent additions are a Dictionary of Debate Terminology, an article about the Unwritten Rules of debate, and some historical resources about the 1969 National Debate Tournament.

Debate Novel

Okay, so here's sort of a crazy thing. A long time ago, the director of the documentary wrote a novel about college level debate. Originally the novel was structurally modeled after the Sound and the Fury, so there was going to be three first person sections and a fourth, third-person omniscient. Each section was supposed to interact in some way with the others and help to tell the larger story from different perspectives. This is an idea, stolen from Faulkner, later made popular by Pulp Fiction.

Anyway, it wasn't supposed to be a big deal. Just four short short stories that interact. Except when the author got started he had a hard time stopping. Each short story turned into a novel. So instead of having a single novel with four interacting stories, like the Sound and the Fury you had four free standing novels going on for hundreds and hundreds of pages, more like the Lord of the Rings Trilogy.

Well, the first volume, set at UC Berkeley in the 1990s, is now available for sale through Smashwords and Amazon for Kindle.

Itt's hard to believe there is so much cool debate stuff but there it is.

Read the novel, watch the DVD, and send us your feedback!

Love,

The DEBATE TEAM team