Your judges are volunteers. Some have sat through two hundred rounds and some have never seen one, and you won't know which you've got until you start. Write for the one who has never seen a debate, because the veteran will follow that too. Jargon loses rounds. Signposting wins them.

Speaker one defines the motion and puts your case on the table. Speaker two takes apart what the other side said and adds your second argument. Speaker three rebuts and then weighs, and the fastest way to lose a close round is to let them introduce something new in the last ninety seconds. Sort these roles out before the tournament, not during prep when everyone is panicking.

• Split your prep: two silent minutes where nobody talks and everybody writes, five to pick and build two arguments, four on what the other side will say, three rehearsing your opening twenty seconds out loud.
• Two deep arguments beat five shallow ones. Depth means a mechanism — the actual chain by which the harm happens — plus one named example from the curriculum.
• Weigh out loud, in words a judge can mark: how many people, how badly, how likely, and whether it can be reversed. Say "even if they're right about that, our harm can't be undone and theirs can."
• Rebut in groups, not line by line. "They made three points about the economy and all three assume the market adjusts instantly" buries more than four separate replies would.
• Define your terms in the first thirty seconds, fairly, but in the version of the world that suits you. Nobody wins a round on a definitional fight. People definitely lose them.
• Look up. A speech read word for word off a page scores below a rougher one delivered to someone's face.

The prompts are deliberately strange, and the temptation is to pick whichever one sounds most interesting. Pick the one you can put two specific examples under instead. An essay with a named case in it beats an essay of well-phrased generalities every single time.

The shape that scores: your position in the first two sentences, then every paragraph moving the argument somewhere new rather than restating it, then the turn where you give the other side its strongest form before answering it. Whatever you do, don't close on a summary.

• Budget your minutes before you write a word. Roughly a fifth planning, most of it drafting, a slice at the end to read it back. Stopping mid-sentence costs more than a thin third paragraph.
• Build an examples bank as you study. Twenty entries, each with what happened, which section it sits in, and one arguable claim it supports. You'll spend every one of them in debate.
• Have a voice. Take a position instead of politely surveying both sides, and make at least one sentence in the piece genuinely good.
• Cut the openings that say nothing: "throughout history", "in today's society", "since the dawn of time".
• When you edit a teammate, give one structural note and one sentence-level note, both specific. "Your second paragraph argues for a different claim than your first" is worth ten comments saying "good point".

That scoring rule is the entire strategy. A blank answer is worth nothing, so there's never a reason to leave one. Cut six options down to two, pick both, and take the partial credit rather than gambling everything on one guess.

The questions reward reasoning over recall. You'll get far more "which of these thinkers would most object to this proposal" than "in which year did this happen". Learn what people believed and why. Then learn the dates anyway, because the date is very often the hinge the question turns on.

• Pace at roughly thirty seconds a question. If you're still reading one at ninety seconds, mark two plausible options, flag it, move.
• Divide the theme three ways for depth, but make sure all three of you have read all of it once. You each sit the whole paper alone.
• For every topic, be able to say what it is, why the writers put it in this theme, and one thing you could argue about it. The third one is where the marks are.
• Sit a full timed set at least twice before the round. Working under the clock is a separate skill from knowing the material.
• Check the current scoring rules in the official handbook before you commit to a guessing strategy. They've been adjusted between seasons.

The Bowl is the event teams lose to disorganisation rather than ignorance. Three people who each half-know the answer will talk over each other until the timer runs out. Decide your roles before the round starts, and stick to them when it gets tight.

Give one person the device and one person the clock, and agree in advance who makes the final call when the three of you disagree. Rotate those jobs through practice, then lock them for the real thing.

• Agree a spoken rule: ten seconds of open discussion, then the caller decides and the holder taps. Nothing gets reopened after the tap.
• Multiple selection applies here too. Two answers you half-believe beat one you're guessing at.
• The questions lean on media, so the visual and audio corners of the theme pay off out of all proportion. Paintings, album covers, film stills, buildings, maps.
• Practise with images instead of text flashcards. Cover the caption and name the thing.
• Don't let the loudest teammate win by default. Agree in advance that a specific reason outranks a strong feeling.