Rapid Fire Rules/Expectations

‘Rapid Fire’ is NEDA’s unique extemporaneous debating competition!

Rapid Fire is debated by individual competitors, with sides and topics announced at the start of each round.  Topics are selected by the director of each individual tournament, and cover a wide variety of fields and issues.

The debate is to be treated as a pre-policy debate like Crossfire.  There are no policy requirements even if the resolution is phrased as a policy resolution.  All debates should focus on if the resolution is true or false and should be judged using that same standard.

Debaters may quote research to support their claims or use common knowledge/reasoning to support their claims. Quoted material should not carry more weight than in an argument using common knowledge/reasoning just because it is quoted.

Because all topic research is done individually and immediately before each round, it is possible for debaters from the same school to debate against each other in a Rapid Fire round.

The debate should begin 20:00 after the debaters receive the topic.

Rapid Fire Format:

• Affirmative Constructive – 4 minutes
• Negative Constructive – 4 minutes
  • First Crossfire – 3 minutes
• Affirmative Rebuttal – 4 minutes
• Negative Rebuttal – 4 minutes
  • Second Crossfire – 3 minutes
• Affirmative Closing – 1 minute
• Negative Closing – 1 minute

Both teams have 2 minutes of prep time to use throughout the speech; it’s assumed that neither team will use prep time before a crossfire dialogue.