I Will Not Use Your Bullet Points Sir or Madam

Debate was once again in full swing and I had spent most of the off season scheming and fantasizing about debate. You want to know why? Because I am a massive nerd, that is why. In debate you were expected to keep notes on your opponents speeches and answer them back point for point. I was not into that so I made a new kind of note paper that reflected my disdain for their little point by point system. Instead of writing down everything they said I wrote a big, almost invisible ONE, TWO, and THREE with room a little line for their main point and contention. When I started taking notes I would just write one or two things about their first second and third point and then a note or two about just how wrong they were and go to work on them when it was my turn to speak. Almost every single round a kid, and by kid I mean someone my same age, would get up and do their speech and then I would get up and ask them questions with no good answers just to make them look bad. Following the cross examination I would get up and give my rebuttal to the nonsense they had proposed, which by the by I would be defending myself the next round. They would try and follow along where I countered their arguments but I had not written down their arguments by number or referred back to them. This made them think I was doing it wrong or that I was loosing the game. I was not doing it wrong and they would soon see that they had fallen into a trap. When they got up to cross examine my attack on their weak case they would almost always say I had not countered any of their arguments because I had not referred to them by number. I would then offhandedly observe that I responded to all of their important points I just wasn't going to teach them how to take notes. They would sometimes get flustered and insist that I had lost the debate because I had not answer their points by number designation. I would then burn up the rest of their time by restating my rebuttal of each of their points and then time would be called. All but the best debaters were done there and would spend their next speech explaining how I had not done my job by saying their numbering system back to them. Like thin in the jargon, “Point 1A man is born free he didn't answer that so flow that over to my side I win that point.” So on and so forth till their time was up. I would get up and give a little shuffle of my papers and then say my opponent must have confused the persuasive style of Lincoln Douglas debate with the more analytically rigid Cross-X style and that they had unfortunately not taken the time to defend their case. I would restate all of the content and counterarguments that I had provided and point out it was not my job to tie my rebuttal to their arbitrary note system. The other guy or gal had one last speech to try and save the deal but it was over. Going into my third tournament of the year I had not lost a single round. In the first two tournaments, for the sake of time, they had not declared a single winner but usually four unbeaten kids would all get first place. Then they had one that let us battle all the way to the ground.