At the Toronto Debating Society, members will defend any side of any issue to challenge even their own viewpoints. In general, we don’t necessarily believe a single word we’re saying!

To debate effectively, you don’t have to take what you are saying about particular subject to heart – all you have to do is make convincing arguments about your proposition and persuade your audience that your point of view is more sound than you opponent(s). In fact, a good challenge for all debaters is to take the side of an argument that you don’t actually believe in.

The Random Roles debate is the pinnacle exercise for this philosophy. Could you defend a position without knowing what your position is ahead of time?

Format

The topic is known ahead of time. Four debaters will sign up for a “general” debating position, but the specific speaking positions will remain unassigned.

The speaker will create and share the definition for the resolution well in advance of the debate to guide the debaters in their research.

As the debate begins, the speaker announces the definition and introduces the Prime Minister by selecting the name from a hat. During the Prime Minister’s speech, the remaining debaters must take careful notes as they do not know if they are about to oppose or support the points being presented. The remaining positions are announced in turn as the debate continues.

Scoring

The debate is scored as a regular debate and the adjudicator will not take into consideration that the roles were selected at random. The challenge for the debaters is to make it appear that everything went according to plan and there was no random selection. Debaters must take care in delivering a convincing presentation which even exercises good teamwork.

Examples

Debaters would be well advised to learn from previous successful randomly-selected debaters.

• Watch our random roles debates online. (YouTube)