Most of you are probably wrapping up finals (except for my former quarter-system charges at Oregon and others elsewhere, sadface) and are eagerly anticipating freedom from academic work for a few months.
Not so fast! Assuming you are going to be debating next year, summer is the time when you get the chance to improve. If you weren't in the top ten overall teams last year, you probably have a significant amount of work to do over the summer if you want to have a shot at the title next year. I have a few humble suggestions.
1. See the title.
You have been liberated from the requirement of reading what your teachers want you to read. Now you have three months where you can be in full control of your reading list. If you haven't developed a reading habit, now is the time. The most important thing is to be consistently reading books over the next three months. If you find yourself getting stuck on one book, pick up a different one and start reading that one. But read, every day.
Books have a way of teaching you a few concepts very, very well. Books are repetitive - most of the time they will contain 2 or 3 major arguments, and then spend 300 pages or so applying those arguments to diverse situations. That repetition is a good thing. If you hear an argument once, you will easily comprehend it, but you will have a difficult time truly understanding it. Seeing an argument applied in a myriad of ways will give you an ability to use that argument when it comes up in a debate round.
Books are also a way to become more cynical, something that is key to the success of anyone who is going to rely on winning straight-up debates. Let's face it, at this point you've been marinated for roughly 13-15 years in progressive, hopeful ideology (unless you are lucky enough to be studying at a Christian school, in which case you've been marinated for roughly 13-15 years in a progressive, hopeful Christian ideology.) You aren't going to be reading The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker in your critical theory class, nor will you be reading The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley or The Delinquent Teenager by Donna LaFramboise in your environmental studies class. Your psychology class won't contain anything like Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind, Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow, Nassim Taleb's Fooled by Randomness, or Robert Wright's The Moral Animal. Hell, your economics professor probably forgot who Ludwig von Mises and Henry Hazlitt were, and they certainly won't include Liberalism, Economics in One Lesson, or Individualism and Economic Order in their syllabus. Your peace studies class probably won't touch on Thomas Schelling's The Strategy of Conflict or Edward Luttwak's Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace. And your political science class will surely ignore Taleb's The Black Swan, Mancur Olson's The Rise and Decline of Nations, and Bryan Caplan's The Myth of the Rational Voter.
I try to be subtle.
2. Practice.
I'd go to policy camp, if I had the time and money to do so. My favorite analogy for NPDA/CEDA is Japanese Baseball/Major League Baseball. Clearly, if you were playing in the Japanese baseball, there might be some quirks about your sport that major leaguers won't understand, but if you got the opportunity to go a MLB training camp you wouldn't pass it up. The policy community is much sounder and better at explaining theory and the K debate - if you are having trouble with those areas, policy camp is the place to be.
Moreover, learning how to cut a card and assemble arguments is really, really useful for parliamentary debate. When you get used to seeing different arguments as pieces on a chessboard that can be combined in different ways, as opposed to distillations of truth that come from on high, you'll do better.
If you can't go to camp, you should try and find a policy coach in your area and work with them. I speak from personal experience when I say that this is extremely valuable.
Speed shouldn't be the priority. I think it's important for people to know how to go faster in the abstract - I found myself frustrated by the fact that my coaching staff seemed to treat my slowness as something that was intrinsic to my debating, rather than something that can be fixed. Most debaters now have to do a lot more work improving their word economy before they can really get anything out of physically speaking faster.
3. Anticipate and block out useful arguments.
I can tell you write now that the block "Romney and Obama are identical," if crafted properly, will be incredibly useful to you in the fall. As will the "Romney is a diabolical demon/Romney is the coolest ever" blocks. As will the "Greece leaves/doesn't leave the Eurozone" blocks, as well as a few others. Think through these questions. Read about them. Go exploring on Wikipedia and on both sides of the pundit-osphere. More than the writing of the blocks is the "headwork" that goes along with writing them. The more you war game out different situations in your spare time, the less work you will actually have to do in-round to generate the arguments you need to win.
(FWIW, I'd start with Haidt, Ridley, Kahneman, and Liberalism, and then go on from there.)
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