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Hello everyone! Today, I’m going to be talking about this debate camp I went to, where they explained how debate works. There are 2 sides in a debate: the government and the opposition. The governments always with the motion and the opposition is always against the motion. The motion is written like this: this house something something something. It could be this house believes that or this house bans. It could be anything like that. The motion is the topic of the debate. The order of the debate is this. First is the Prime Minister, then it’s the Leader of the Opposition, then the Deputy Prime Minister, the Deputy Leader of Opposition, then the members of Government and Opposition, then finally the Closing Government and Closing Opposition (Also Known as Government Whip or Opposition Whip). Everyone except the Prime Minister tries to show that the other sides points are less important than their points or not important at all to give their side an advantage. This is known as refutation. However, the Prime Minister doesn’t do that, as they are the first speaker no matter what, so they can’t talk about anyone else’s point. You might think that because of this, being the Prime Minister is the easiest job. It’s not. You see, the Prime Minister has to model the debate. What that means is that they manage the motion. They have to consider who it will affect, who will implement it (which is defining who is “this house”), where it will happen, any additional details so there are no loopholes, and the goals of it. Anyway, the judges decide who wins the debate by how many points they have given to each team from winning rounds (one round being 2 speeches). Your chances of winning a round improve at lot if you refute the points of your opponents. Also, you can’t be against what your side is debating. You’re supposed to talk about the topic in a negative or positive way even if you don’t like it that way. However, sometimes it could be about cats versus dogs, so therefore it wouldn’t be negative but you still have to argue for your side, even if you disagree with your side. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to lie, it just means that you have to argue for it even if you think that the other side is right. Say for example, if I said that I like dogs better than cats, but in the event I’m forced to be on the side which says the cats are better than dogs, I have debate that cats are better than dogs, even if I don’t believe that. However, you can’t just say your speech in any way you want. Each time you present a point, you have to use the format of PAEL. P stand for point, A stand for analysis E stands for example and L stands for link. It’s the structuring that you should use to present your points during the speech. It’s a very common way of presenting points all around the world. Fun Fact! PAEL spelled backwards is LEAP. By. the way, everything that I’ve said so far comes from the debate style of British Parliamentary. Anyway, bye everyone and see you later!