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ELINOR STEPHENSON: OK. So now that we've covered a few tips on types of rebuttal and how to improve the quality of your rebuttal, let's move on to how to structure your rebuttal. So one pretty helpful structure that you might have heard about when it comes to rebuttal is thematic rebuttal, which is actually pretty simple. All it involves is sorting our rebuttal into a few big themes, issues, or questions.

And this has a few benefits. It makes your speech a lot neater, stops you from repeating yourself or getting sidetracked, and it allows you to be a lot more efficient going through your rebuttal. So how do we do it? Basically, we're going to select or break the debate down into a few main themes. And these should be maybe 2 to 3, and they should be the key clashes or moments of conflict in the debate.

Obviously, themes are usually debate-specific, but there are some common breakdowns which can show you what sort of themes you should be aiming for. For example, in many debates, we might break the debate down into stakeholders, for example, students, teachers, and parents or high-achieving students versus low-achieving students. Secondly, we might break the debate down into types of consequences. So how does this policy affect the economy versus how does this policy affect society?

Thirdly, we might break down the consequences into long- and short-term effects. So for example, in a debate about international relations, we might talk about how a policy impacts international relations in the short run and then how that changes in the long run. What are the long-term implications for security or stability in the region that we're talking about? And fourthly, we might break the debate into a principled clash and a practical clash.

So obviously, you will not use these sets of themes in every debate. But those are the kind of things that you're looking for-- a few broad, big ideas about how the debate could go. And you're going to adapt those to whichever debate you get.

So here's an example. Let's say we had the topic that we should have quotas for women in parliament. My instinct going into that debate would be that we'll probably have a theme about how this will affect female politicians and then how this will affect the making of policy that might be good for women.

But let's say that the other team has a really strong principled argument in this debate. I could simply add a theme which says, is this principally just? So that's the kind of questions that we're going to be asking or the kind of themes that we're going to be breaking the debate down into.

And once we've done that, essentially all we've got to do is divide our ideas into these themes. So put your regular rebuttal under each of those headings. If you've got a piece of paper, write the theme at the top and sort your rebuttal underneath it. If you've got palm cards, you could have a title palm card with the name of the theme.

Have a brief look over these before getting up to do your speech. Check that your themes are all good. But essentially, this will allow you to sort your rebuttal on each main idea into the debate under a heading and make it super clear.

And once you've got the hang of that, you can really start to use these themes to make extra claims and types of commentary in the debate. For example, you might do things like introduce subthemes into the debate.

So let's say we have the debate that we should ban selective schools. We might say, how does this affect students academically? And how does this affect students emotionally or in terms of their welfare? And then we might break each of those themes into what this looks like for current selective school students and what this looks like for current comprehensive school students. So we can introduce some substructure into our themes.

Secondly, we can provide some commentary about which ideas within these themes are comparatively strong or weak. So we can use the impacting tips that I told you earlier to explain why the themes which our team is doing better in are the ones which are most important.

Thirdly, we can use our themes to reference previous responses or ideas from our team-- this is called whipping-- and explain why our team's arguments are so important. So we can bring them back into the debate and remind the adjudicator why they were very valuable. And fourthly, we can start to think about prioritisation and creating a win strategy. And we can really tell the adjudicator which ideas we think might be pivotal in the deciding of the debate.

So overall, what are the take-home messages about rebuttal? Firstly, we want our rebuttal to be multilayered. And to do that, we're going to think about the different functions of rebuttal and the different things which we can address in the other team's case. And this will help us to generate more rebuttal to really knock their points out.

Secondly, we're going to make our rebuttal more sophisticated by being comparative and by introducing explanations of why our ideas are important. And thirdly, we can try to structure our rebuttal using thematic rebuttal and breaking the debate down into chunks.