Bowen,+Kathy

Kathy Bowen – 2009 TOC

I debated for Gulliver Prep in highschool, and just finished my second year debating for UC Berkeley. I’d say my argument preference is specificity – that is, I would rather hear disads and kritiks with specific link arguments, and counterplans with high quality solvency evidence. Your arguments should be well explained and impacted if you’d like me to vote on them. A few things to remember in front of me:

- Impact, evidence, and argument comparison is extremely important. Tell me why you outweigh, solve, and/or turn your opponents arguments. If followed by a reasonable warrant these arguments will work tremendously in your favor. Tell me why I should prefer your evidence and why the surrounding/unhlighted parts of your opponents' evidence proves your argument. These kinds of comparisons will drastically reduce intervention into the debate and drastically increase my comfort level with the decision.

- Dropped arguments are still arguments that need to be explained and impacted. Don’t expect me to entirely discount your opponent if I don’t understand what your argument is or how it applies in the debate.

- Speed is fine, but slower on T and theory, particularly if you plan to go for either one. Impact both. For T - I haven't judged that many debates on the topic but am pretty well versed in alternative energy literature. So - slow down and explain.

- I give a lot of weight to logical and well-applied defensive arguments. No internal link, no link uniqueness, alternate causalities, not reverse causal etc can greatly undermine your opponent’s argument.

- K arguments: I don’t have a great deal of familiarity with arguments like Zizek/Lacan/Baudrillard. It’s cool if you want to talk about the line of flight but tell me what that means, how it applies to the aff/neg, and why it comes first/solves/outweighs.