Carroll,+Patrick

I was a policy debater at Pittsburgh Central Catholic during my time in high school and competed at many national tournaments. I now help coach the Central Catholic policy team when I am home from college. I do not debate in college.

As a preface to my complete preferences I will say this: I default to tab on all of my decisions. Even if both teams come in and run arguments I have a problem with, I am still going to pick up the team who does the better job convincing me they are right. I can deal with a good amount of speed. On a scale of one to ten I would say I can realistically flow an eight. HOWEVER, you must must must be clear on your tags and analytics! Basically, if you want it only my flow, slow down and enunciate or I will not write it down. I will say clear once, after that I am just going to flow whatever I feel like you are saying. If your argument is not on my flow I will not evaluate it, so if you don't want to take a loss on something you covered make sure you make it clear.

Now onto my full on preferences: Overview: I consider my self to be pretty darn conservative as compared to the national circuit. This means that I prefer real world arguments with logical and persuasive points. However, as stated above, this is just what I like to see and I will still vote on anything, so if you come into the round with my kind of case and you still get obliterated by thirty generic nuclear war scenarios I will be more than happy to drop you. I am a huge fan of case debates and logical arguments so if you want me to be really impressed try and run old school affs and neg strats that are tailored to the specific cases.

Speed: I am not a fan of speed and while (as I said earlier) I can flow it, You being slow and persuasive can sway me more in your direction. It will also impress me if you go slow on the text of your card and leverage it as a persuasive piece. Debators have a nasty habit of going into light speed when they hit the text of all their cards. The way I see it, you spent hours trying to find this one card from a qualified author, let him/her make your point for you. This will also show me that you are proud of your evidence and will make it less likely that I have to call for evidence at the end of the round. My biggest thing about speed is that no matter how fast you go you must be coherent. I use persuasiveness of speech for 90% of my speaker points, so you can go any speed you want, but be persuasive if you want high speaks.

Aff: The specifics of aff debate is perhaps the area where I am the most conservative. I believe in inherency, I ran inherency, and I will happily sign a ballot based on inherency. I won't drop you on principal for not putting inherency in your 1AC, but it will not start you off on the right foot with me. In my opinion, the aff must prove an attitudinal or structural barrier in addition to simply proving that the plan is unnecessary in order to show that resolutional action is uniquely necessary. I am a definite T advocate so your plan text must be solidly topical or you are gonna be in some trouble. You must have good solvency. If you don't have a solvency advocate it'll hurt your speaks, since you have no business running that case. Though once again I will pick you up with no solvency advocate if you really destroy the neg. I am happy to vote on a neg A strat of the 1AC not justifying resolutional action by not proving inherency or solvency. I prefer strait up policy affs, but run whatever you want as long as you think you can defend it well. I am also completely willing to vote on small harms, I do not need extinction or genocide as a harm in order to vote aff. Finally, what I want most of all from a case is just to give a concrete option to vote on, I am not going to vote on your harms alone, I am going to vote based on your entire case, so present it as a real world policy option and you will be on my good side from the get-go.

Neg: I'll go over specifics of the neg, but generally I like non-generic real world negatives having to deal with probable scenarios and impacts, things that you could tell someone who was not involved with debate and not have them look at you like you are crazy.

On-Case: As discussed earlier, I am happy to vote on only on-case arguments, but you have to do a ton of work to get me there and prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the case does not justify the resolution, so I am not likely to vote on this. Also as discussed earlier, I am happy to vote on inherency alone, however to get me there you must structure it with an interpretation, a violation, and voters.

DA's: I have a complicated love-hate relationship with disadvantages. I think they are some of the most legitimate arguments if argued correctly, but also can be the lazy debator's best friend. I was a huge link debater in high school which means I do not like links that have nothing to do with the case. In my opinion the link must be specific to the plan the aff is proposing and must be assuming the same world as the rest of the DA. In addition, I do believe in zero risk of the link so if the aff can prove that your link has little or nothing to do with their case I will throw out the DA. I believe that the entirety of any disadvantage being run in the round must also completely assume the same world from the uniqueness to the impact. That means that you can't run a uniqueness discussing passing a bill in 2013 and an impact describing the likelihood of nuclear war from 1985. In addition, while I realize most people violate this and therefore will vote with little trepidation on this, I prefer reasonable and probable DA's that you would feel confident describing to a non-debater.

CP's: I dislike PICs and obviously topical counterplans. I could go on for several pages on specifics of counterplans so I will keep this brief (ask me any additional questions you may have before the round). I believe presumption swings aff when the neg runs a counterplan. I am happy to vote on perms, theory (PICs bad, etc.), and anything you want to run about multiple worlds being abusive. All in all, you are presenting an advocacy similar to the 1AC when you run a counterplan, so you MUST have a solvency advocate, and you should be prepared to defend it similarly to how you would defend an aff.

Kritik's: I could also go on for pages about K's, so I will try to keep this brief as well. I do not like K's which attempt to disguise a floating PIC inside of the alt and bring it up in the 2NC to try to steal aff ground. I will vote on a well structured K, but these seem to be more and more rare. Make sure your evidence all agrees with one another and get a concrete link to plan (link must be specific to the plan). Don't be abusive with your alt, so show why you must uniquely provide for a world which can only be accessed through your alt which is mutually exclusive from the plan. I think most of the abuse in bad K arguments happens in the alt, so I will be watching that area of the debate closely. I'm happy to vote on a well argued perm or well argued theory, but due to the complexity often inherent in K's, make sure that you present these arguments clearly, as they have a tendency to muddle the flow.

Topicality: I am a big fan of a well run topicality argument, however, I am somewhat wary of negs running a ton of T's to time screw the aff, so make sure you run the T you stick with well. I am not on good terms with reasonability arguments, and I believe that in order to be topical, a case must adhere to the specifics of the resolution. I am a proponent of well run FX T, and willing to apply it to any case who uses steps to justify the resolution. The biggest thing I'll value in a good T debate is the aff's plan text in a vacuum, so make sure that your plan text is on point and fulfills the resolution completely without taking any additional steps.

Lastly, I am totally open to arguments I haven't heard before, and willing to vote on them. The biggest thing is just that you are persuasive and make a good case to me at the end of the round as to way your world is better than the opposing world. I don't vote on card count, so make your case with better arguments, not just an obscene amount of crappy evidence. I don't consider the aff or neg as having an inherent advantage in the round. It's policy, come prepared for the round we have, I'm not docking the opposing team just because they showed up and argued aff or neg. I'm perfectly happy to call for evidence after the round, particularly if the content of it was one of the main points in the round and nobody bothered actually saying what the text of it was at a somewhat reasonable speed so I could hear it.

If I missed anything, I apologize, feel free to ask me anything before the round starts.