Card Cutting

In our third meeting, we went over how to research and cut cards (pieces of debate used in a debate).

To begin your research, you should read Wikipedia pages for important terms and historical events and figure out what the important events are in the topic you’re researching (for example, what started the controversy over an issue and generated journalism)? This helps you understand what timeframe a given literature is going to be in.

Using tricks like

“exact phrase”

“word” OR “phrase”

“phrase” — term

word AROUND(#) word

helps you find higher quality articles.

Parts of a card:

Tag: A brief, concise summary of the argument the card supports, usually one sentence long. It should be clear and persuasive.

Citation: The source of the evidence, including the author, publication, date, and sometimes a link. It looks like this: Author’s Last Name ‘Publication Year — Author’s First Name; Author’s Qualifications. Specific Publication Date; “Title of Article”; Publication Source; Link to Article; //Initials

Paste in the article, then, underline relevant portions of the card.

Then, you should highlight the words of the card that you plan to read in round by clicking the highlight button, then green. Don’t highlight too little (such that the card no longer makes sense), but don’t highlight too much, either, because that takes too long to read in-round.

However, you cannot cut off a paragraph mid-sentence or omit sections of the article in between paragraphs. To clarify, you are allowed to only use paragraphs 5-13 of a specific article, but you cannot use paragraphs 1, 5, and 8 if you don’t include the paragraphs in between them.

Here are a few examples.