Text Expansion: The Next Frontier in Paperless Debate

Introduction

The day I was introduced to Verbatim by an older team member, I was amazed. The endless hours I had spent micro-managing the format of cards as a novice suddenly became minutes as I was given access to tools such as “Shrink” and “Tag” which simplified the entire process. In my mind Verbatim was the first major innovation in Paperless Debate. The second, arguably, was the current (and I suspect growing) transition to flowing on laptops which has been helped in part by Flexcel. In this article I want to discuss what I suspect may be the third, and potentially most valuable innovation in paperless debate: text expansion software.

In short, text expansion programs allow you to type a short phrase that is then replaced by a different (generally longer and more complex) phrase. A canonical example is replacing “omw” with “On my way.” Their debate application, especially for theory and/or tricks, is even more powerful. For example, imagine typing “rvis bad” and having your pre-written analytics about how RVIs ruin debate instantly inserted into the current speech doc without having to fumble through theory backfiles. 

Speech Doc Applications

The summer before my senior year I (along with my labmates) was introduced to a specific text expansion program PhraseExpress, by Marshall Thompson. We were all initially amazed, and I went on to use the program regularly during my senior year when I was constructing speech docs in prep. I only programmed half a dozen “phrases” but they often saved me crucial seconds during prep time. When I hit a debater who read a 3 minute long underview, all I had to type was “!spikes K” and I instantly had the 1NC version of my spikes K. When someone read an extemp-ed condo bad shell, I didn’t even need to open the dropbox, all I had to type was “!condo good” and I was set. 

Speech doc construction should take as little prep time as possible, and text expansion programs like Phrase Express can help debaters reduce the time they’re searching through backfiles and give them more time generating arguments and strategies. I imagine this could also be helpful for K debaters with overviews or answers to perms, as well as theory debaters who have favorite shells and other paradigm arguments. You could even use it for topic specific evidence/arguments that tend to come up very frequently! For a more specific tutorial on how I used it, check out this video.

Flowing Applications 

While I flowed on paper as a competitor, text expansion could also help revolutionize those who flow on their laptops, both judges and students alike. Flexcel already offers this service, for those who flow in Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel, text expansion programs can offer this function across platforms. This is especially helpful for those who prefer to share their flows with others, as converting your shorthand into full text phrases can make it easier to process for others later on. For students this would also allow you to have pre-programmed pre-flows for each of your common cases. 

Disclaimers

Text expansion software isn’t perfect, and I think there’s a ways to go before it’s optimized for debate. For example, many of the programs have yearly subscription models geared towards businesses, rather than free or “free-mium” models for individuals. Additionally, with Phrase Express I haven’t been able to get highlighting text to work (though I suspect this is a Mac problem as it worked on my PC when I was in high school). However, I think there’s still a lot of applications for this in flowing and especially with analytics and theory in debate. I also think that as the community moves more and more towards paperless debate hopefully we might see a debate-focused text expansion software akin to Verbatim or Flexcel.