[caption id="attachment_31902" align="alignright" width="400"] Enting Lee speaks as Leader Opposition in the final round of the 2017 HWS Round Robin (c) Howard and William Smith Colleges[/caption] The HWS Round Robin has claimed yet another weekend of the lives of some of the best debaters in the world. In a tradition that began at the 2016 HWS Round Robin, two judging panels watched each round and delivered oral adjudications independently, with the aggregate number of points & speaker points used to determine the break (tab here). After a struggle for team spots, which can be achieved either through winning a prestigious named tournament or ...

With debaters from all around the world recovering on their travels back home, it's time to look back at the ups and downs of the tournament. Helena Hecke commented on the Dutch WUDC experience. The debating world has once more crowned the best debaters in the world. This year it's USU A from Sydney in the Open category, Tel Aviv A in the ESL category and Belgrade C in the EFL category. But celebrating the new world champions is not all that has happened at this year’s Worlds. The debating: Of course debating is the most important aspect at WUDC. This year, the Adjudication ...

After nine preliminary rounds, two days of elimination rounds and three finals, the winners of this years WUDC have been determined. [caption id="attachment_30874" align="alignright" width="302"] EFL Champions 2017: Belgrade C ©DutchWUDC[/caption] In the EFL Final, Belgrade C (Miloš Marjanović, Teodora Rešetar) took the win via unanimous decision against BINUS A (Stella Emada Bestio, Willem Chua) in Opening Government, SKT A (Konrad Gütschow, Philipp Schirmer) in Opening Opposition and SUFE B (Jinting Liu, Miranda Shen Yan) in Closing Government on the motion "THBT the European left should promote a hard left agenda, including the nationalisation of major industry, very high tax rates on the ...

Having been openly trans for a while, at the beginning of this year I abandoned my old name and started dressing more unambiguously femininely. When I went to debating competitions it was obvious that there were some practical things that needed to do be done to make debating an enjoyable experience for transgender people. In particular, I argued that the debating circuit should implement pronoun introductions at the start of debates. Since then I’ve been really pleased with the UK debating circuit’s openness to pronoun introductions, and numerous competitions have used them successfully. For reference, I use the words trans and ...