I’m a novice in PF and I was wondering if you have any flow tips or if I could like see what your flows look like.
sorry for the late response – i’ve been at tournaments over the weekends and leaving/coming back home during the weekdays when the lighting is still bad before the sunrise. (and picture quality matters 😤)
here are some tips for flowing:
-use one pen color for your side and one pen color for your opponents side
-flow on two sheets of paper lol
-choose one color for the affirmation and one for the negation. this way, when you’re debating in outrounds near midnight with a frazzled brain, you won’t get confused over which side you are (trust me – this happens more often than you’d expect)
-create a shorthand for commonly used words! i use ! for “impact,” a circle with a line through it for “can’t,” and a triangle for “change,” for example.
-i would also familiarize myself with common vocab from each new topic so that i could abbreviate. for example, “PC” takes a lot less time to write compared to “price controls”
-if you’re second speaker like me and need to reference both your flow and laptop for cards, i write a bracket symbol “[-]” to indicate to myself when i should switch from looking at he flow to reading evidence.
-circle parts in your opponents’ case that seem weak, confusing, or suspicious so that you remember to ask them about it in cross
-it’s surprising how few debaters do this, but flow your partner’s speech!! you need to mirror each other in what you go for in the round, and it’s hard to do that if you don’t write down what they say
-when your opponents bring up the same point in a late speech, just use an arrow to bring the prior idea further on the flow – there’s no need to rewrite the ideas
-distinguish cards from ideas by squaring or bracketing the names
here’s the flows of a round i watched this october. they’re kinda messy, but i hope it’s at least somewhat helpful! :^)
