Voss,+Jon

Director of Debate - Glenbrook South High School Yes email chain: jvoss1223 AT gmail DOT com.
 * Jon Voss**

I've coached at Glenbrook south since the fall of 2010. I've been around debate, first as a debater and then as a coach, since 2002. I used to judge more but still judge a lot. I spend my summers at debate camp and actively assist my debaters in their research, so I am familiar enough with the topic.

I used to have a really long judging philosophy...it is probably still up on the old judge wiki if you go back a few edits. The length of it was unnecessary, and since you're likely reading this with only a few minutes before a debate, I really endeavored to pare this down.

-- No topical plan that starts with "The United States federal government should "? No win. This is non-negotiable. -- You can't clip cards. This too is non-negotiable. If I catch it, I'll happily ring you up and spend the next hour of my life reading Cracked. If you're accusing a team of it, you need to be able to present me with a recording to review. -- You need to flow and answer arguments in the order they were presented (or some other order that you've made clear to me). I don't follow along in the speech doc during your speech unless I think you're clipping cards, so a lack of coherent order is unadvisable. -- If I can't understand your argument -- either due to your lack of clarity or your __argument's lack of coherence__, I will not vote for it. The latter is often the downfall of most negative critiques. -- One conditional advocacy + the squo is almost always safe. Two + the squo is usually safe. Any more and you're playing with fire. Yes judge kick unless one team explicitly makes an argument that convinces me to conceive differently of presumption. -- I've voted on topicality, "engagement must be a quid-pro-quo" once or twice this year, but it occurred as a result of egregious affirmative errors. All things being equal, I am grossly sympathetic to negative gripes about the size of the topic but ultimately find myself agreeing with the aff that there's no interpretation of engagement that allows us to do much about it. -- One place where I think I differ from some other judges is that I am often way less interested in "impact defense" than "link defense." This is equally true of my thoughts toward negative disadvantages and affirmative advantages. For example, if the aff wins with certainty that they stop a US-China conflict over some hotspot, I'm highly unlikely to vote neg and place my faith in our ability to use BMD and the big red telephone at the White House to dampen the conflict. Similarly, if the neg wins that your plan absolutely crashes the economy by disrupting the market or causing some agenda item to fail, I will mostly be unconcerned that there are some other historical explanations for great power wars than "resource scarcity." The higher up the link "chain" you can indict your opponent's argument, the better. -- I like to reward debaters who work hard, and I will work hard not to miss anything if I'm judging your debate. But I'm also a human being who is almost always tired because I have spent the last 9 years coaching debate...so if you seem like you don't care about the debate at hand, I am unlikely to try harder than you did. -- It's unlikely that you'll have me in a debate in which you're going for "framework" or T-USFG, but if you do:
 * Fairness is the only thing I care about. It's both the single strongest internal link to every other thing debate can do for you and a standalone impact. It isn't that I don't think debating government policy is not useful for other reasons, but you only have 5 minutes in the 2nr to prove that your model of debate is a valuable one.
 * 'member Shivley 2k? I member...