Debate Evidence Cards: How to Organise Your PDFs and Speak from Your Cards

However your format names it, a card has three parts: a short claim in your own words, the exact lines you will quote, and the citation that says where they came from. Judges and opponents ask for the third part more than any other, so it is the part you cannot afford to lose.

1. Put every source PDF into one place, so one search covers all of them.
2. Read and highlight only the lines you may quote. Do not highlight whole paragraphs.
3. Give each highlight a short claim in your own words, written by hand or typed.
4. Arrange the cards in the order you will speak, and keep a second order for the rebuttal.
5. Rehearse with a timer, and listen to the cards read back to find the ones that sound clumsy.

A Model UN position paper and a moot-court memorial both work the same way: every claim is tied to a source and a page. If your notes keep that link, writing the paper, and answering a question from the chair or the bench, gets much faster.

ArguLinx runs natively on iPad and Android tablets. It is not a card-cutting add-in for a word processor: it keeps your PDFs unchanged and organises your marks on top of them.

• Every highlight becomes a card that remembers its file and page, which is your citation.
• The cards sit in a running-order index you can reorder as your speech changes.
• You can connect a card in one PDF to a card in another, so a claim and its counter-evidence stay together.
• One search covers every PDF, your notes, scanned pages and handwritten notes.
• Speak mode steps through your cards with Next and Previous and a timer, and can read each card out loud for rehearsal.