Kann,+Sharon

Background: (2006-2010) Cedar Rapids Washington (TOC twice, Nationals twice) (2010-2014) University of Iowa (NDT 4 times, Octos 2014) Rounds on the topic: Camp (HSS 7 Week), Michigan, GMNDC, Iowa State Tournament

General Thoughts:


 * -I believe debate is for the debaters, I will do everything in power to respect and fairly evaluate anything that is put in front of me. I'd be lying to say I don't have some biases or areas of more familiarity, but I believe my role as a judge isn't to enforce those things so much as be open to whatever the debaters in the room have worked to produce.**


 * The only thing I don't think I can check at the door is the way I comprehend debates, which is largely in terms of the flow and technical construction/elements of arguments. I'm not against abandoning these things, I just don't believe I have enough experience to confidently evaluate debates differently than this yet.**

-Speed fine, technical awesome, incomprehensibility not so awesome.

-Paperless—I debate paperless in college, so I get that sometimes things don't work. If transition times are getting excessive I'll transition to taking the paperless time out of your prep. If you don’t mark your cards and/or there’s a lot of dispute about the integrity of your paperless methods I’ll ask for a copy of the speech and read and mark your evidence too.

-BE NICE

-If you have a question, feel free to ask.

Specific Arguments: -Disadvantages—Absolutely. There probably is such a thing as zero risk. Link uniqueness is important, and can be a separate question from top level uniqueness of the DA.

-Case—Such an undervalued part of negative strategy, but so much fun. If you can wage a solid aff-specific case debate I’ll probably be really happy. Even if you’re a “K team” there’s still an incredible benefit to being able to contest the veracity of the aff’s internal links/impacts. People also need to be better about impacting case arguments in terms of how it effects either the aff or the ballot.

-CP—Of course. As for cheating CPs, I’m sympathetic to the aff’s theoretical objections but the burden is on them to articulate those in a way beyond “but this isn’t fair". I find that I'm usually somewhat neg leaning not because I genuinely believe tricky CPs are good, but because there often is a specific or unique impact expressed by the aff.

-T—Clear distinctions supported by grammar/qualified sources are more important than generic limits claims. Good evidence makes a world of difference, especially if you can contextualize the effects of your limits arguments (ie: what is or isn’t topical) through the use of a couple pieces of evidence. The distinction between reasonability/competing interpretations is odd to me, as they’re both impact framing arguments that devolve into tag-line explanations that ask the judge to do similar things. In either case, you’d be better served by winning some impacts to your interpretation than telling me why either leads to a race to the bottom.

-K (generally)—I’m familiar, I read them, explain your stuff and you’ll be fine. Affs need to watch out for the classic tricks and negs need to contextualize their explanations within examples from the affirmative/beyond repeating buzzwords. The alt is important—affs need to pressure the neg here because odds are you won’t win a link turn, and negs need to be clearest here because it’s a question of how my ballot can remedy all the stuff you pointed out in your top-heavy overview.

-Performance/K affs without a plan/"other"—My default is that the resolution/plan are the focus of the debate.

THAT SAID, I used to spend a lot of time doing research on both sides of the "framework" debate and can be persuaded by logical and well-executed defense of what you're doing and why my ballot is important (or not important in some cases) to that end. In the same way I'd expect the neg to articulate an impact beyond "what you do is bad", I like it when the aff rises to the same standard and is able explain a more nuanced impact level claim.

This past year we stopped reading framework and instead utilized strategies that attempted to engage the aff at different content levels. I personally find this preferable, but will listen to whatever strategy people are comfortable with. I think these debates are interesting when done well, but often find myself struggling to resolve questions of impact prioritization because teams often overestimate the strength of their framing arguments and underestimate their opponents.

The short version of that is: do what you feel comfortable doing, I'll listen and do my best to resolve, but be aware that my lens for interpreting debates is largely technical and flow-based so when I'm in doubt I'll attempt to reconstruct what's happened based on that.

-Theory—Most things are reasons to reject the argument not the team, but given some good debating/drops I’ll vote differently. Slow down. There’s a certain threshold for what constitutes a theory argument, too. “They’re condo—that’s bad—next” doesn’t meet it.