Back to School Tech Tips: File Structure

Within a few days is the start of the 2025-2026 debate season, beginning debates on the Sept-Oct plea bargaining topic. For those who participated in debate camps or competed in tournaments that somehow used the Sept-Oct topic before September, your debate season has already begun. Regardless, a new debate season means that starting anew is a necessity for folder setup and file organization, as new topics (hopefully) mean the creation of new files. For that purpose, I will be releasing a series of four articles over the next four days, each focused on a specific tech tip that is useful to know at the start of a debate season Because the new debate season also coincides with the back to school season, some tips will be dual-use, aiding in both your debate and scholastic/school performance.

This article is the first of four. When the new articles are released, there will be links to those other articles at the end of this sentence.

My background is using Windows 10 and MS Word/Verbatim. The specific terminology/technical language as well as the setup methods will obviously vary, but generally speaking, all the tips listed below (unless otherwise noted) ought to be equally useful across all devices. This means that for people somehow debating via Google Suite products (like Google Docs and debate Chrome web-extensions), or an Apple operating system, do not fret, but do be aware some details will differ given your different tech setup.

Root Directory/Top-Level Folder Structure

If you plan on the long-term usage of your file structure, especially if you desire for it to be used by future freshman debaters after your graduation, it’s worthwhile to have a Dropbox, especially one usable throughout many topics throughout several years. This allows compiling all the work from an institution from all prior debate topics, which makes it easier to develop backfiles like impact defense, impact cores, and common framing cards. LD often relies on every-green moral philosophy and political theory, where the date of publication matters much less than the substance of the argument. Of course some frameworks are more reliant on more up-to-date literature, but these are usually more critical debate oriented frameworks. In general, having old files is always useful; they give your team a competitive edge over newer debate teams, or even older debate teams who less vigorously archive previous work. 

Similarly, archived files and backfiles also leave files for future debaters, in which all the work from previous topics can potentially be reused or looked at as reference material. Inevitably, the NSDA repeats past topics or regurgitates/recycles them with minor variation, such as the 2025 Sept-Oct topic being an inversion of the 2017 Jan-Feb topic. One of the most extreme examples is the 2025 nationals topic on violent revolutions/political oppression, which has been repeated or regurgitated/recycled 5x times since 1988. The political science scholarship has obviously been updated since 1988, but the moral justifications for and against rebelling against the government hasn’t substantially changed. Using backfiles from 1988 is obviously ill-advised, but it proves the point that like history, the NSDA topic selection repeats itself, and it’s good advice to take advantage of that fact.

After you’re done debating a topic, or perhaps during summer and winter break, look through all the cards your team cut on a topic and see what is worthwhile for being included in your backfiles. You can develop as many backfiles as you deem worthwhile, but I would start on impact defense, impact cores, and a framework backfiles. If your circuit routinely debates kritiks or kritik-oriented frameworks, I would also start a kritik answers backfile (see the link here for a list of the most common kritiks to prepare for)

Remember that some backfiles can be of a lower quality than others given the relative likelihood of you encountering those arguments. For instance, economy impact defense or answers to utilitarianism ought to be prioritized over answers to spark (which says nuclear war is good) or wipeout (which says human extinction is good). Of course, hypothetically, spark and wipeout could be run in any debate with extinction-level impacts, and these arguments act as an institutional backfile check to see if your school has answers to a weird, off-beat, fairly illogical and esoteric argument as opposed to a core negative strategy. It is good to hedge your bets on main-line impacts and kritik arguments 

Remember that these files are NOT substitutes for new topic research, as the cards are likely less pertinent to the current topic and are more likely to be outdated. Additionally, a reliance on backfiles (or the work of other people’s work like briefs or Opencaselist) means your card cutting skill is atrophying, which is dangerous when you can’t rely on the works of others (such as with a weird topic with little precedent in previous topics).

What folders are worthwhile including in your top-level folder? Some “must-haves” would be the active/current debate season folder, an archive of prior debate seasons, and a backfile folder. 

New Topic Folders’ File Organization

When beginning research on a new topic, step one is ALWAYS your backend folder creation, as that allows you to organize everything in the topic and not blend files from different topics together. Given the time-limited nature of pre-round and in-round preparation, you do not want to waste time accidentally opening files from previous topics due to a bad organizational system. In team environments using file sharing programs like Dropbox, most debaters do not need to do this step as it's usually done by team leadership. 

Let’s assume your team doesn’t already have a file structure in use. What folders are worthwhile to include? 

Below is a screenshot of the folder structure I provided for a team I previously coached. Note that my folder structure is perhaps overly regimented due to my background in utilizing year-long topics for policy. Your folder structure, especially when first starting up, will likely be better off being more simplified to increase the likelihood of you using it. 

Example formatted topic template with numbers (recommended version)

Of course, everyone has idiosyncratic preferences, and the folders I used while participating in debate won’t be the same as yours, but there are several “must-have” folders in any file structure. Arguably, the “must-have” folders should be inclusive of the following: aff, neg, briefs, tournament speeches, scouting files, and RFDs. 

If you have a larger team, I would add a “Research Assignments” folder where less experienced debaters can add files that need to be reviewed and potentially modified by team leadership before being integrated into the main, varsity-level files. One optional folder is a “Trash” or “Maybe Useful” folder for half-baked cards or files that are aspirationally useful—they may not have a good purpose today, or perhaps ever, but it’s a good heuristic to never delete anything that could have a purpose in the future. 

Another optional folder would be a work-in-progress folder for files that can’t yet be organized in the other folders as they are still a work-in-progress. However, to some extent, all debate files are works-in-progress given that the development of each topic is iterative, and a file produced at the beginning of a topic may be insufficient at the end of a topic without updates.

Notice in my example that each folder is numbered from 0 to 8. This is a folder naming trick for you to override the alphabetical ordering of folders in file explorer, which can make finding a specific folder quickly a harder task. The below examples show how an unnumbered folder structure that is alphabetized is less useful than a folder structure where you use numbers at the start of each folder to order your folders in a way that makes the most sense to you.

New Topic Templates to Copy Paste File Organization

When making a folder for a new topic, given the fact that many high schoolers participate in a debate event or multiple topics (even multiple years), you can safely assume that you will be doing a similar process for the next topic ~2 months from now when the new topic is released.  Recreating ~6 folders for each new topic by hand is a waste of time given that—depending on your debate event, participation in nationals tournaments, and/or involvement in NCFL—you will debate ~4-8 distinct topics, requiring the creation and labeling of ~24-48 folders. 

If you have a folder structure you are accustomed to and familiar with, consider making a template folder for you to copy paste when a new topic is released in order to minimize work and increase the consistency of your file structure. Add a fill-in-the-blank phrase like “Template” or “xxx” to indicate that this is a generic template, and does not contain topic specific information, and when a new topic is released, fill out the template with topic specific labeling.

For the 2025-2026 debate season, I replaced “xxx” in my template for Sept-Oct with “Plea Bargaining” when the new topic was released,. As seen in the picture below of the 2024-2025 folder, eventually over, the course of the year , the folder is fully populated with topic specific info and there are no longer any template files.

Example of a fully formatted folder at year's end

If you are happy with how you formatted a topic folder, consider making a template folder for an entirely new debate season. Before adding topic specific information, duplicate that new topic folder so that you have a folder setup for the topics of Sept-Oct, Nov-Dec, Jan-Feb, Mar-Apr, NCFL (if applicable), and NSDA Nationals..

Optionally, you can include template files within your template folders. For instance, for 2NR extensions of disadvantages, you can pre-create subdividers for uniqueness, links, internal links, and impacts in your template to both serve as a self-reminder of the formatting as well as decrease duplicate effort. This can also work for aff, such as pre-organizing the headers for your 1AR blocks in the order of case, disadvantages, counterplans, kritiks, topicality, and theory (if applicable) so that you always know that your counterplan answers will be in-between your answers to disadvantages and kritiks. These sound relatively unimportant, but if you’re wasting time scrolling up and down in your nav bar to find cards because your files are not consistently formatted, you are more likely to lose a round.

Similarly, many people have go-to generic arguments that you will almost always make against a certain type of argument like kritiks, topicality/theory, and counterplans. For instance, against topicality, you almost always will have a defense of reasonability or a functional limits check argument, so don’t needlessly copy paste that content from an old 1AR file to the new 1AR file. Put those generic blocks in your 1AR template if your consistently reading the same arguments Do be wary of how you can become predictable and/or lock-in inferior arguments if your debate skills have increased, but you’re still using the generic blocks from your template you wrote earlier in your debate career.

Note that I have provided at the download link below a sample blank template folder for an entire year. You can either use the folder structure as-is, or modify a topic template to your preferences, and then replace the preset folder templates for each month with the new folder template that you modified. If you do the second option, this would involve modifying the folders for one month, like Sept-Oct, deleting the contents of all other folders like Nov-Dec and Jan-Feb, and then copy pasting the folders from Sept-Oct into the empty folders for each other topic.

New Year Template LD.zip

Download ZIP • 13KB

Other

Additionally, there are some small platform specific quality-of-life tips that are worthwhile knowing, but are less important to know and are more variable in terms of whether they will work with your specific setup.

One tip is to color code your folders, especially priority folders. For instance, instead of needing to read the terms “aff” and “neg,” you can look for the color-coded green and red folders. This is particularly useful if you're dyslexic or have issues seeing, but likely less so for most other people given that the terms “aff” and “neg” are some of the shortest possible words in the English language. Personally, I do not color code my files due to difficulties easily implementing this in Windows file explorer, but it is remarkably easy to do via the right-click menu in Google Drive. 

Color coding also allows the sub-categorization of folders within the folder, as opposed to needing to multiply the amount of folders unnecessarily. For instance, my Google Drive for school is color coded based on whether the class is Monday/Wednesday, Tuesday/Thursday, or asynchronous. The colors visually indicate these groupings of classes are distinct from each other, but doesn’t require the creation of 3x folders for Monday/Wednesday, Tuesday/Thursday, and asynchronous classes.

I believe a similar process exists for OneDrive on the web. You can also do this on other platforms via third party folder coloring software, which should be free, but that is likely too much effort to make your folders look pretty.