Leveling Up Your Debate Software 2: Automatic Cites and Quals Processing

This is my second post focusing on software to improve the efficiency of debate preparation. This, by itself, might be a confusing fact to some. Why spend so much time improving the efficiency of debate work, instead of just getting on with the work itself?

The answer to this riddle is simple math. Debate success often comes down to the smallest of margins. It's a game of inches, where even seemingly minor advantages can accumulate to make a significant difference.

One of my favorite webcomics by xkcd breaks it down:

If you spend thirty seconds citing an average card, and you cut an average of five cards a day, you will spend three days over the course of five years of debate cutting cards. Cut that time in half, and you directly gain a day and a half of your life over five years, all while saving yourself tons of tedious labor over the course of the year. These increments add up, and any change can make a difference!

For competitive debaters, efficient evidence preparation is crucial. Throughout their careers, debaters cut thousands of cards, each requiring proper formatting with citations and author qualifications. This time-consuming process, when streamlined, not only frees up time for strategic preparation but also reduces the temptation to cut corners on citations or qualifications. By making formatting more efficient, debaters can maintain high standards of evidence presentation without sacrificing valuable prep time.

The "Reformat Quals & Cites" Tool

If you are on Windows, this simple tool automates the formatting of qualifications and citations. You can download it here.

Key Features

1. Qualification Reformatting: Select an author’s biography, press Control + Shift + Q. The program will select 1-2 key qualifications or affiliations for a given author and put them in a citation format. Can handle multiple authors at once.
2. Citation Reformatting: Select text containing information you want included in a cite and press Ctrl+Shift+X. The program will format your selection into a cite.
3. Customizable Hotkeys: You can easily change the hotkeys to suit your preferences.

To install the software, follow the installation and setup instructions on the page with the download link.

Other, Equally Critical Features

If you enjoy fun, you can go into the settings file to enable Clod. This will replace the default status tooltips by sending your input to a helpful creature named Clod. Clod will drop whatever important tasks he is doing, such as stretching or rolling around, to help you with your request. You will need to restart the program for Clod to take effect.

A Word of Caution

Because this tool is powered by AI, it's important to remember that AI can make mistakes. Double-check the reformatted citations and qualifications for accuracy. The tool is meant to assist and speed up your workflow, not replace careful human review.

Updates to Fast Debate Paste

Since my first Debate Software post, I have added a variety of features to Fast Debate Paste. You can download the latest version here. As before, this utility is a fast way to send text from a source document (such as a webpage or PDF) to a target document (such as the document in which you are cutting cards).

Fast Debate Paste works well together with the automatic quals and cites processing utility. Since you no longer have to format cites, you can simply fast paste all of the components of a cite into your target document, select them, and they will automatically be transformed into a cite.

Combined Demo

You can see these two utilities in action together below:

Hope you find these tools helpful!