By the Equality in Forensics Contributor Team
Learn more about Equality in Forensics and our mission.
Once you’ve decided your argument, written your rhetoric, and come up with what you want to say during your speech, it’s time for the last step of pre-round preparation possible in Congressional Debate… padding! Very simply, padding is the act of writing your speech down on the final medium from which you deliver it. Most commonly, this is a legal pad, but this resource will also explore some other common options that are used in the congress circuit.
Padding before the round is ideal, but it’s perfectly okay if you need to pad a speech last-minute if you’re a professional procrastinator. Since padding is the final step of pre-round preparation, it’s also the easiest part to do during the round when needed (although you should still avoid this if possible, it’s far more helpful to spend this time writing refutations or extensions instead).
<aside> <img src="/icons/star-outline_red.svg" alt="/icons/star-outline_red.svg" width="40px" /> For information on Refutation and Extensions, take a look at their respective resource guides.
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This guide will go over how to pad, what to pad with, and some helpful tools to help you along the way. But first, a quick history lesson — before the COVID-19 pandemic, everyone used a legal pad with either traditional padding or printed speeches. Then, when debate went online, speeches were given word-for-word on a Google Doc with the easy ability to copy and paste as one pleased. When debate went back in-person, these strategies stuck around, leading to sticky note speeches and iPads. The goal of this page is to teach the pros and cons of each method so you can best decide what works for you.
This resource page has an accompanying slideshow created by Equality in Forensics Service Director C.J. Getting and Equality in Forensics contributor Rohan Jain. Check it out!
This slideshow includes a compiled list of different traditionally-padded speeches.
This slideshow includes a compiled list of different traditionally-padded speeches.
The most common medium of padding is a legal pad. These can be bought on Amazon for cheap — between $1.50 and $2.00 a piece. Legal pads also come in a large variety of forms, each with their own benefits and drawbacks. If you’re a debater that tends to gesture with your legal pad, you might favor a thicker one that makes gesturing with that side more difficult. Depending on the color you write with, a yellow legal pad might make things easier to read compared to a white one. Point is, find a legal pad that fits your style, whatever that might be.
Once you’ve decided which legal pad to use, it’s time to start padding your speech. The first method of padding this page will go over is traditional padding.
The biggest note with traditional padding is the shortening of phrases. The goal is to make your speech easy to understand, such that even if you get lost, it’s incredibly easy to pick up where you were without looking for your exact spot. Thus, any signposting is standardized across all speeches and never written out. Instead, write an ‘I’ to mark your impact, ‘SQ’ for status quo, or ‘W’ for warrant.
Intros should be (almost) entirely memorized, so most people don’t write more than a line explaining it. For example:
McDonalds $13/hr, rep clown > serious MinWage. Econ policy ≠ laugh, affirm.
That introduction is typically around 75 words lasting 30 seconds. But by memorizing and shortening it, you leave more room for refutations and extensions, which might not be memorized since they’re developed during the round.
The second note towards this shortening is, well, shorthand. Instead of writing ‘increase’ or ‘decrease,’ use up and down arrows. Is, isn’t, are, and aren’t all become equal or inequal signs. And just about anything else you can remember that can be shortened, should be shortened.
In terms of sources, these are typically the longest parts of a speech if fully written out, so it’s helpful to create your own system to remember different things. The New York Times could become NYT; Washington Post into WaPo, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies becomes CSIS. The list is only limited by what you can remember, so try and use common abbreviations wherever possible to make this process easier.
For more unique shorthand, stick to what you’re good at. If you’re fluent in another language and it has a shorter translation of a longer, common English phrase, it might be a smart idea to write that phrase in the other language.
<aside> 👨⚖️ William Tong, a final round PO at the 2021 TOC, uses the mandarin character for Taiwan (台湾**)** when mentioning the island.
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Since traditional padding is the standard, there aren’t really any significant pros to the method. Rather, the drawbacks of the other methods simply aren’t present and act like benefits. That is, with one exception — prepping in-round. If you’re in the middle of a round without a speech ready, it’s either impossible or unfeasible to go to a printer and print out your speech. Similarly, sticky note padding takes even longer than traditional padding, making it unpreferred during time crunches like padding in-round. Thus, regardless of the benefits of new padding methods, traditional padding remains the go-to for in-round padding situations.
As for cons, the main one is the difficulty of adapting your speech, which is the primary reason sticky notes and iPads were popularized post-pandemic. If you get dropped by the PO and need to go late-round, you’ll either end up erasing 70% of your speech or just start over from scratch. If you choose to pad before the round, time can also be an issue, with traditional padding taking substantially longer than simply printing a speech out or using an iPad.
Printed speeches is the other form of padding popular pre-pandemic. If you are one who likes to prepare and pad speeches days before the tournament starts, this might be the form for you. It’s incredibly fast compared to the alternative padding methods — just put some glue or tape down on your pad and attach the speech you’ve written out ahead of time. This speed is the primary benefit of printed speeches, and the main reason it’s so common with novices.
Similarly to traditional padding, you want to shorthand as much as possible. Although you can fit a word-for-word speech when printed, you should refrain from doing so such that you can find your spot when you’ve forgotten a phrase. After all, you shouldn’t be reading your speech off your legal pad. Instead, you should be able to pick it up every once and a while and figure out where you need to go quickly and without pausing… writing out every single word prevents you from doing that effectively.
Thus, all the notes about shorthand and notation are just as relevant in printed speeches as they are in traditional padding.
But if there’s so much time saved by simply printing speeches, why isn’t it so popular? It really comes down to three main reasons:
<aside> <img src="/icons/star-outline_red.svg" alt="/icons/star-outline_red.svg" width="40px" /> Your teachers aren’t lying! This study by 3 researchers at Kent State University explains the benefits of handwritten notetaking over typing them.
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This slideshow includes a compiled list of different printed speeches.
This slideshow includes a compiled list of different printed speeches.
This slideshow includes a compiled list of different speeches padded speeches using the sticky notes method.
In the years after the COVID-19 pandemic, sticky note padding have become arguably the single most common form of padding, especially on the national circuit. Simply, sticky note speeches attempt to replicate the adaptability of online speeches for digital tournaments with the legal pad accessibility for in-person tournaments.
Here, each section of your speech (status quo, warrant, and impact) are written on sticky notes that can be easily taken off if needed. If someone gives an impact that’s identical to yours, just peel off the sticky note and add a new blank one where you can write out a new impact. Instead of erasing large parts of your speech and being unable to fit new information into the margins, sticky notes allow for a quick-and-easy switch of any area that’s suddenly become rehash.
Same with printed speeches and traditional padding, shorthand is essential. However, there can be some subtle differences with the help of your new sticky tool. Instead of writing out ‘SQ’ to represent the status quo or ‘W’ for warrant, you can opt for different colored sticky notes that represent those blocks. Maybe blue fits well for your impact, green for the status quo, and yellow for the warrant. Just make sure the colors can be easily differentiated and that your writing is clear as day (don’t use blue pen on a blue sticky note).
As for drawbacks, the main one is time. Simply put, padding with sticky notes takes substantially more time than printing that same speech or just using an iPad. It’s even slower than traditional padding, which is why the old style is still the defacto method for anyone who needs to pad in-round. So while sticky note padding prevents you from needing to start your speech from scratch, it’s not the preferred method of preparation in the rare event that you do need to.
But sticky notes also have cool benefits for speeches, even if they’re padded traditionally or printed. Specifically, they can be used to add to the margins with refutation or extensions. This is especially helpful if you want to re-use the same speech multiple times in a season, but remove the round-specific refutations that get added in after a tournament.