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In policy debate, Lincoln-Douglas, and other evidence-heavy formats, highlighting refers to the practice of visually marking — typically with a yellow or colored background in a word processor — only the words a debater intends to vocalize from a piece of evidence. The full text of the cut card remains on the page so judges and opponents can verify context, but only the highlighted portion is actually read in-round.
Highlighting interacts with several core debate norms:
A common in-round challenge is to ask the opponent to re-read the highlighting or to compare the highlighted text against the surrounding paragraph. If the highlighted words, read in sequence, no longer form a coherent grammatical claim or change the author's conclusion, the judge may discount or reject the evidence.
Because spreading (rapid delivery) compresses how much text a debater can vocalize per minute, highlighting choices materially shape which warrants actually enter the round. Coaches therefore treat highlighting as a substantive analytical task, not merely formatting — the highlighter decides what the evidence says for purposes of the debate.
Underlining typically marks text the debater considers analytically important or that the author emphasized; highlighting marks the narrower subset of words actually read aloud in-round.
Most circuits permit it, but if the skipped words materially change the author's meaning, opponents can challenge the evidence and judges may disregard it under evidence ethics norms.
On the open-source debate caselist wikis used by U.S. high school and college circuits, teams post full cards with highlighting preserved as part of disclosure.