Public Forum debate drills for writing contentions, winning crossfire and collapsing in summary and final focus. Practise PF online on any resolution.
Public Forum is a two-on-two debate built for a general audience. The resolutions are current-events questions that change every month or two, and the judge is often a parent or a community volunteer rather than a former debater. Winning PF means being right and being easy to follow.
A round opens with a coin flip for side and speaking order. Each team gives a four-minute constructive, followed by crossfire, where both speakers question each other directly. Then come four-minute rebuttals, three-minute summaries, a grand crossfire with all four debaters, and two-minute final focus speeches. The round gets shorter as it goes, so the skill that decides most rounds is collapsing: choosing the one or two arguments you are winning and spending the last speeches on them.
Judges reward clear contentions with real evidence, rebuttals that answer what the other team actually said, and a summary and final focus that tell them exactly why to vote. Because you might debate either side, good PF teams prepare a case for both and know the other side as well as their own.
Prep happens mostly before the tournament, with three minutes per team in the round. You research the resolution, write two cases, and build responses to the arguments you expect.
The drills below train each part of that. Burden Identification shows what each side must win. The argument drills build contentions a lay judge can follow, and Stakeholder Mapping finds the people the other team forgot. Rebuttal and Fallacy drills prepare you for rebuttal and crossfire. Concision and Clash & Weighing train the summary and final focus, where PF rounds are won.
Each card says how the drill helps in a Public Forum round.
Learn what a complete contention needs, so a lay judge can follow it from claim to impact without a card doing the work.
Map everyone a current-events resolution affects, and find the people your opponents forgot to mention.
Write a contention the way you would read it in constructive: clear, evidenced and built to survive crossfire.
Write the impact and the example that a lay judge remembers when they fill in the ballot after final focus.
Find what each side has to prove on the resolution, so you know what your case must win whichever side you flip.
Compress an argument to what survives into summary and final focus, where every second counts.
Write a four-minute case, or a summary that pulls your strongest arguments together for final focus.
Answer a real argument with a named technique, the way you would in rebuttal before the round moves to summary.
Build a case for either side of the resolution, with contentions, responses and a summary you can carry to final focus.
Find the two or three clashes that matter and weigh them, so your summary and final focus tell the judge how to vote.
Catch the fallacy in an opponent's argument and name it clearly enough for a lay judge to see it in crossfire.
Write current-events resolutions a lay judge can follow, then argue both sides before the coin flip does it for you.
Work on one speech at a time. Write a contention as you would read it in constructive, answer a real argument as you would in rebuttal, or cut your case down to what fits in final focus. The drills below give each of those a structure.
Be clear before you are clever. Lay judges vote for the team whose story they understood, so explain the link from your claim to your impact in plain language, and tell them in summary and final focus exactly why your side wins.
Collapsing means dropping the arguments you are losing and spending summary and final focus on the one or two you are winning. The Clash & Weighing drill trains you to pick them, and the Concision Drill trains you to say them in less time.
Yes. Most drills let you choose your own motion or resolution, so you can practise on the topic you are debating this month.