How to prepare for a debate motion in 15 minutes

In British Parliamentary you get 15 minutes of prep, and it's easy to lose half of it.

The usual pattern goes like this. You read the motion, panic a little, brainstorm whatever comes to mind, write down the first five or six ideas, and walk into the round hoping. Almost everyone preps this way at first, and it leaves good arguments unfound.

Below is a minute-by-minute method. Treat the timings as a guide and keep the order.

Minutes 0 to 2: understand the motion

Read the motion twice before you generate anything, and on the second read answer three questions.

What changes? For a policy motion ("THW ban X"), what does the ban look like, who enforces it, and what's different the day after? For a value motion ("THS X" or "THBT X"), what belief or norm is under debate?

What happens now? What does the world look like without the motion? This is your counterfactual, and your case is only as good as your picture of what you're comparing against.

Who's involved? Who is affected, who carries it out, and who resists it? The obvious groups give you your first arguments. The less obvious ones often give you your best.

Skip this step and you'll spend the next thirteen minutes building arguments on a misread motion.

Minutes 2 to 7: generate arguments

Now brainstorm, with structure. For each idea, write down three things: the claim, the mechanism (how it happens) and the impact (why it matters). If you can't name a mechanism, the idea isn't an argument yet. Put it in the margin and move on.

To generate arguments instead of waiting for them to arrive, run the motion through a few lenses. Take "THW legalize assisted dying":

• People: the patient, the family, the doctor, the hospital, disabled people, elderly people who already feel like a burden, religious communities. Each is a possible argument.
• Kinds of harm: the patient's physical suffering, the cost of prolonged care, the psychological weight on the family, and a shift in how a society values life.
• Time: what happens right away, in a year, and in a generation. Short-term and long-term effects are often different arguments.
• The counterfactual: if the status quo is already bad, that helps Government. If it's mostly fine, Government has to explain why the change is worth it.

Aim for four or five arguments by minute seven. You won't use them all.

Minutes 7 to 10: cut to two or three

Deciding which arguments to keep is where most of the case gets decided. Ask three questions.

Which one is hardest to answer? That's your lead argument, even if it isn't the one you like most.

Which ones stand on their own? If two arguments rely on the same mechanism, one good response takes out both. Keep arguments with different foundations so the other side has to answer each one separately.

Which ones are easy to weigh? The judge has seven minutes to see why your argument matters. An impact they can picture beats an abstract one.

Then cut. Two deep arguments beat four shallow ones.

Minutes 10 to 13: build the speech

A typical seven-minute opening speech:

• Setup, 30 to 60 seconds: what the round is about and the question the judge has to answer. This is your framing.
• First argument, 2 to 2.5 minutes: your strongest, with claim, mechanism, impact and an example if you have one.
• Second argument, 2 to 2.5 minutes: ideally a different mechanism or a different group of people.
• Pre-emption, 30 to 60 seconds: the other side's most obvious argument, and why it fails or matters less.

If you're on Opposition or giving the second speech for your team, leave room for rebuttal. If you're in closing half, your prep has a different job: finding new material your opening won't run. The extension lesson covers that.

Write bullet points. A script sounds like a script, and you can't adapt it when the other team says something you didn't expect.

Minutes 13 to 15: prep the other side

Stop thinking about your case and think about theirs.

What will they argue? Write down their two most likely arguments.

What will you say back? Two sentences on each is enough to stop you freezing in the round.

Where will the round be fought? If you can predict the main clash, you can write the weighing now: "This round comes down to the cost of care against the right to choose how you die, and here's why the right wins."

Prep mistakes

Prepping alone with your partner sitting next to you. Split the work. One of you generates arguments while the other maps the people affected and the other side's case. Then put it together.

Twelve minutes on arguments and three on everything else. An argument you haven't cut, structured or weighed won't do much for you in the round.

Giving up on motions you don't like. Some motions are boring and some are on topics you know nothing about. The lenses above work without background knowledge. That's what they're for.

Practise it

The Draw on the motions page gives you a motion, a position and a 15-minute clock. Run this method on a few draws a week. If you have a tournament coming up, find it on the tournament calendar: its prep page shows the motions it has set before.