What is Buildacase?
Buildacase is, at its core, a community of people developing their debating skills. Our members range from total novices, to experienced debaters seeking more structured ways to practice, to established ‘top 10’ speakers looking to sharpen their skills.
This community revolves around the free lessons I've written (and rewritten, and rewritten again), which were originally built upon the foundations of what I learned when I first began debating in 2017. As a novice, I could not find a mentor, so I took it upon myself to find debating resources online and by reaching out to judges for feedback. From 2019-2023 I coached hundreds of debaters at various skill levels, and I found myself always teaching the same things over and over again. Eventually, I decided to write a Google Doc to copy-paste whenever a student needed to review the basics.
Many resources and mentors have had an enormous impact on me. Manchester Debating Union’s novice presentations written by Lucie Slamova and Jacklin Kwan, Hadar Goldberg’s lecture on being comparative, Noam Dahan’s lecture on PM/LO speeches, as well as judge feedback and online lectures from brilliant debaters including Matt Caito, Enting Lee, Lucia Arce, Gwen Stearns, Chris Pang, Har Naveenjeet Singh, Ploopy, Lucy Murphy, Katarina Jensen, Rhys Steele, Tin Puljic, Hamza Tariq Caudhry and Ignacio Lorenzo Villareal (not a comprehensive list, apologies if I did not mention you). I’ve cited debaters and linked sources wherever I can.
Buildacase’s goal is to provide beginners with a strong foundation, and to equip them with the things a lot of other courses and tutorials tend to take for granted. We achieve this by treating debating less as an academic pursuit focusing on memorization and theorizing, and more like an athletic one. While concepts are certainly explained, they are hammered in through active drills and repetition.
Buildacase is a rigorous course. Some students have completed it in as little as 2 months, while others have taken almost a year. What matters is that you give each exercise, and each debate speech, as much time as it requires to be executed to the best of your current ability. Setting your own deadlines or expectations is highly discouraged - it'll cause you to rush, and to progress more slowly in the long run. Plenty of students come here with the intent to achieve something specific in a certain amount of time - if that is a necessity for you, then this course may not be the best choice.
It is not going to make you a speaker that breaks at every comp on its own, but it will teach you how to practice, how to use the resources available to you on the internet, and equip you with the tools and skills you need to take advantage of them. Think of Buildacase as one big tutorial zone in a sandbox game or your anime training arc; it'll take a while to get through it, but once you're done, you'll be ready to enter a world full of fun and interesting sources of instruction.
What are the fundamentals?
The answer to this question depends on who you ask - but what we cover here focuses on a specific subset of what others might call the core fundamentals of debating - the things you'll need to apply and learn everything else more effectively. These core fundamentals focus in three areas:
Clear and simple argument structure — the ability to convey information to a judge in the way you intend to convey, and to understand and ‘translate’ other debaters’ arguments into a coherent structure.
Attentive and fastidious listening and observing.
And the big focus of this course overall: Rigorous and comprehensive comparison between arguments — the ability to refute opponents’ arguments and ‘weigh’ between reasonable opposing arguments.
These are not everything there is to know, but they lay down a solid foundation upon which everything else can be built. For example, while we do not touch much strategy, position burdens, or ‘meta-debating,’ such concepts rely on understanding how arguments logically interact and relate to one another and the intended motion — which is what we develop by working on comparison.
Why is Buildacase free?
It’s strange, right? Coaching typically costs anywhere between $50-200/hour (CAD/USD). This website took approximately 200 hours to build, and draws upon insights I developed over years of debating. You can do the math...
However, it takes a village to become a good debater. Dozens of debaters have given me their insights and feedback over 5+ years entirely for free. Without them I would not have been able to create this website or enjoy debating for so many years. As such, I plan to ‘pay it forward’ and showing the same kindness they showed me. There are thousands of young debaters across the world who will never be able to afford a coach, who should still have the opportunity to get a high-quality debate education from experienced debaters. As such, Buildacase’s content will always remain free. If you want to read more about Buildacase's mission, check out the About page.
Good luck.