How to give great whip speeches

Hey there! Just a reminder: this is not a Buildacase course lesson. These articles primarily cover debate theory which are not necessary or super helpful to novices, who need more practical instructions. If you are new and want to improve at debating, I suggest starting with Lesson One.

Here are some ridiculous whip myths I have heard during my five years debating for Hart House (taught by the pros, mind you!). “I should summarize the content brought by all the teams in the round.” “Whip speeches must be sorted by themes.” “I should not add any new content in a whip speech.” Let’s go through each of these myths and explain how to construct a persuasive whip speech.

Content in Whips

Different debaters have two vastly different problems with whip speeches: no content, or too much content. We will start with the first problem: not enough content.

Avoiding adding new content and only summarizing your extension is the fastest way to get low speaks and lose debate rounds. The judges have already tracked your partner’s speech, they do not need repetition. Instead, they need new reasons why you are winning. To that end, whips are the best place to add in content that wins you the round.

There is little opportunity for other teams to respond, so you can sound authoritative.
You speak near the end of the debate, so the judges are zoned in and have your speech fresh in their minds as they deliberate.
Since you speak at the end of the debate, you can strategically reposition your teammate’s extension to win, even if it wasn’t explained properly in extension.

Yes, you cannot explicitly add certain forms of content. You cannot run a brand new argument that is not rooted in your extension’s case. You cannot add a new, unique mechanism that is distinct from your extension’s.

But here is what you can do to add in new content in your speech:

Weighing: why your mechanism is better than your fronthalfs, why your impact is more important than other teams’.
Mitigation and refutation of all other teams in the round

That much is obvious, but how do you do this discreetly without adding too much new stuff? You use language that grounds it in your partner’s extension.

Add context: Point out additional context about the world that changes how certain arguments interact in the round.
- How to sell it: “this is context that an average reasonable voter should know, this is context that is assumed by the infoslide/other team/motion, this is refutation to other bench, this is mitigation proving why we are more important than our fronthalf”
- Requirements: your partner needs to have a case/mech/impact that is relevant to the new context, OR other teams need to have case/mech/impact that has been a main clash throughout the round
- Common error: Not explaining the implication of your context to the judge.

Examples: WIP

“Blow up” the impact: Make your partner’s impact seem very important by adding more depth to it.
- Weigh on multiple metrics, add ‘second-degree’ impacts, add new impacts that are tangential to the main impact but still a result of the mechanism
- How to sell it: “my partner mentioned some obvious good impacts, but here are the more unlikely impacts which are very important…” “there are additional impacts on top of the ones my partner mentioned” “there are several reasons why my partner’s impact is the most important…”)
- You can learn more about metrics and how to weigh in this lesson.
- Requirements: your partner needs to have a case/mech/impact that is relevant to the new impacts/weighing
- Common error: weighing/impacts being too far removed from your partner’s case, so the judge does not credit you. Ask yourself: will a judge be certain that my whip is directly connected to my partner when they first hear the speech?

Examples: WIP

Flipping and weighing: Flipping opponent’s arguments and weighing the harms of the flip. For when your extension is not saveable and you need to win in one speech.
- Requirements: (1) identify a mechanism and impact that your opponent has claimed, (2) show why their outcome is actually a benefit for your side or a serious harm for their side, (3) weigh why that benefit/harm is more important than other arguments in the round.

Examples: WIP

The tl;dr is: there are many different strategies to add high-quality, convincing content to your whips. Once you realize this, you will almost always have too much to say during whips. Now, how do you organize all this content?

Organizing a Whip

The second problem is having too much content or having empty content. Typically, debaters encounter this problem if they have spent too much time writing down/tracking content in the round, and not enough time actually thinking about the content.

There are a few strategies that you can employ while listening to speeches before your whip speech:

A) Organizing arguments into ‘clashes’ and deciding how to address the clash.

Engage in the clash by showing this clash is unimportant, and your extension’s clash is more important
1. Notice how this has two parts: Why they are unimportant, and why your extension is important.
Engage in the clash by showing refuting some arguments inside the clash and weighing why your extension’s argument is more important inside the clash
1. Notice this can have 4+ parts: refuting/mitigating each argument, and building your extension
Ignore the clash (don’t do this — you should have at least 15-20 seconds dedicated to why the clash is not worth spending time on. For example, it is completely outside the bounds of the debate.)
1. You must have good reasons why the clash you ARE spending time on is important

B) Deciding on a goal and building the whip speech around that goal

You don’t have enough time to do everything in a whip. Instead, you have to trust yourself to make the correct decision about time allocation. Personally, all my best speeches are speeches with very specific, granular goals. There can be a few goals:

Rebuild the extension to address refutation or a critical flaw
Weigh your impact (on one or more metrics) or your metric
Refute your opponents
Weigh/mitigate your fronthalf
Explaining the implications of your analysis on how the judge should adjudicate the round***
Address confusion/clarify the clashes and what other teams said in order to do the other four things above

It is very rare that you have to do everything on this list in a debate round. Usually, you have to do just 2-3, or you can spend 1 minute on a few of them and then 4-5 minutes on one main one. The important thing is to rank your goals and spend sufficient time addressing the highest priority goals, and then reflecting after the round if that was indeed the correct strategy. The second most important thing is to always explain the implications of your analysis (all your refutation, your weighing, etc.) on how the judges should adjudicate the round.

C) Write less of what everyone else is saying, write more of what you are going to say, and don’t spend too much time on the low-hanging fruit

The important part of every teams’ argument can be summarized into one to three sentences. As such, you should not be writing an essay on each of your opponent’s arguments. Instead, practice capturing an argument in a short blurb that you can draw upon to refute later.

Claim, context, mech, impact, weighing -> your refutation
If you want to learn more about refutation and argument structure, check out Lessons ().

As a whip, you have almost 60 minutes to think of a solution to the motion that the other speakers only had 15-30 minutes to solve. The vast majority of thinking during the round should be about how to win on the harder arguments. As such, if the PM says an argument that is obviously flawed, you should not spend the whole round thinking of 35 different ways to refute that one argument.

Leave the obvious stuff alone — someone else will probably deal with it before you and render all your refutation useless. If they don’t then you can deal with it easily anyways! Instead, focus on difficult questions, like how you will weigh your partners’ extension, or if you can see any obvious holes in the extension as you created it during prep.

D) Critically assess if what you wrote is worth saying

In strong rooms you will often find some of your speech is said by other speakers, or it becomes useless because of how the debate ends up moving organically, or your partner explains enough that it is no longer necessary to also say it. In these situations, good whips will throw away the redundant parts of their speeches and come up with something new EVEN if it means coming up with something panicked 5 minutes before you speak.

Luckily, this problem can be avoided with practice. The past sections of this article have already covered how to generate new content AND come up with a strategic plan for your speech early into the round. Put the information to good use!

Exercises

Speak in a debate round.

Here’s the thing with practicing whips… It is painful because you really have to watch / debate in a whole round. After 50 minutes of listening to other debaters, you can feel incredibly overwhelmed. If you give a poor speech after 50 minutes, it can be really demotivating for practicing whip speeches going forward. However, there really isn’t a way around it, because whip speeches are unique.

You can try listening to fronthalfs and giving a DLO speech to practice whips more efficiently. But it will not substitute perfectly for whips, because whips have to juggle a lot more content, often run a lot less refutation, and have more time to think strategically.

Therefore, I’m suggesting for the first and ONLY time ever to practice by doing a full debate round. However, to be efficient, I highly recommend focusing on ONE part of a whip speech over a few practice sessions. Do three debate rounds over 2-3 days, but particularly focus on assembling arguments into themes and weighing the themes. Or focus on rebuilding your partners’ argument. Yes, sometimes the round will not call for that skill, depending on the motion and how the debate goes. In those cases, feel free to be flexible, but do not try to do it all! Above all, be kind to yourself, because whips take a long time to become good at!

2. Judge

Judging at a tournament is a very intense and efficient way to expose yourself to many different debate motions, debate speaking styles, and understand what makes an argument persuasive to judges. If you judge, make sure to ask yourself: how could the whip speaker have won that round for their team, what did they miss, or what did the whip speaker do that won the round? As a whip, your primarily goal is to sell your partners’ extension based on what happened in the round. Therefore, judging and critically assessing backhalf teams is a great way to get into the habit of thinking strategically

3. Watch and get inspired

In my opinion, whip speakers are the most entertaining speakers to watch. I personally love whip speeches. They. are my favourite speech, because I feel like I am channeling my favourite debaters’ cool energy when I give a good whip speech.

Here are some of my favourite whips: (Obviously this is not a comprehensive list please do not get upset that I did not put your personal favourite on this short list):

Astana EUDC 2020 | Open Quarterfinals | Room 1 Astana – YouTube – CO whip

Oxford Online IV 2020 Open Final – YouTube – CO whip

Warsaw EUDC 2016 – Open Semis [Channel 1] – YouTube – CO whip