The Art of Flowing

I'm not very good at flowing. I have officially flowed a grand total of four rounds. Three of them were mine, by the way. Ok, I did sort of flow my first round, but I didn't count that one. I didn't have a flowpad yet, which made it hard. I had a composition book, but those have pretty small pages. I had to flow every speech on a different sheet of paper. As if that wasn't hard enough, I also had to do it in reasonably legible handwriting because my partner had injured his right hand and could't flow for himself and needed my notes. Which means I also had to "pre-flow" my speeches. It's not a very good system, but you know what? We won that round.

Even though the art of flowing somewhat baffles me, I've found that it does actually make TP, I mean, uh, Policy, easier to follow! Amazing! Who knew, right? And some of you guys who are not recent debate-converts such as myself are actually really good at it. That's why I call flowing an art. I'm talking two pens in each hand, flowing the current speaker on your left while your right hand flows your own responses and if I look on the ground, you may have slipped off your tournament shoes to write notes to your partner with a pen in your toes. Skills right there, people. Or maybe you just do it the normal way with one pen in one hand, but you remember to write down the sources and are therefore still better than me.

Or maybe you're awesome and flow with a pencil. I've seen it done before. I was kind of shocked, thinking, You can do that?? Yes, yes you can. But probably you can only do it in LD. I suspect you can do all kinds of crazy flowing tricks in LD, because you don't have a partner who will yell at you. When I'm in LD, I intend to invent an intense form of shorthand that only I can read. I'll flow every single word and I'll read the other debaters arguments precisely as he said them. I suspect this method may be faster, which means extra time to prep and/or doodle in the extra column I always leave on the side. (I haven't figured out the eight-columns-per-sheet thing yet and always have nine. But I like the extra space.) Or I may flow in morse code like .. / .-- .. -. / .- - / .-.. .. ..-. . That would be cool.

You're homeschooled, and you are an artist.