Pointer,+Steve

Steve Pointer Gonzaga University Saint George's School

Migrated from debateresults. I have almost exclusively judged college debates for the past decade, and my involvement with high school debate prior to this year has largely been limited to teaching at the Gonzaga Debate Institute. But I'm coaching a high school team this year and so am familiar with the topic after the arguments produced at institute.

First, I’m aware that everybody else’s speaker points are inflated. I don’t give out 29s and 29.5s like you’re entitled to them. To earn them, you have to impress me with a combination of being a good speaker (yes, ethos is important for your points) technically proficient and smart. Good arguments help too. If neither your performance nor its content is exceptional, don’t count on exceptional points. As a general guideline for the negative, I'd rather hear your disads and Ks that are germane to the topic, rather than your politics DA or your State Bad K or some other ubergeneric that bores me every year. I understand that debate is a competitive game, and there is strategic utility to your argument choice if you read one of those things, but it usually makes me less angry when I feel that there is some pedagogical value to arguments as well. No matter what you read, I'm probably going to sit there looking angry anyway, so you should run the arguments you feel give you the best chance to win. But you were going to do that anyway.

Second is the counterplan: Not that I hear many in-depth CP debates anymore (too many clash of civilizations debates to sit through) but I would much rather hear a specific CP than your toolbox advantage CPs. That being said, I’m pretty sympathetic to aff theory arguments about things like multiple international actors that include both the agent and action of plan being a bad thing. Not that you can’t win defenses of these, but my default reaction is to think that most toolbox CPs don’t allow much debate about the literature. (Especially the idea of independently conditional actions, I think these are usually problematic.) I’m also not entirely sold that if conditionality is good in one instance (which it is) that it’s good in an unlimited number of instances. Also, counterplans that obviously link to politics that rely on the aff not having a specific link card to the CP in order to be competitive are annoying to me.

Now that I’ve convinced everybody to move me down in their ordinal rankings, my overall judging philosophy is pretty simple: You need to win an argument and a reason why that argument means that I should vote for you. Feel free to choose whatever type of argument you prefer. Virtually everything in the round is up for debate in front of me. Debating well is vastly more important to me than debating a certain set of arguments or a certain style. A couple of caveats: I have a pretty high standard for what constitutes an argument, especially in theory debates. If your theory blocks consist of 6-10 word blips and you read these at me, we’re going to have a problem. Please explain yourselves, if the argument is important. Also, just reading theory blocks at each other (or any blocks, for that matter) is really uninteresting to me. Actually engaging the other team’s arguments helps. If you make a theory debate messy, I can’t guarantee that the decision will make any sense.

Framework debates are much like theory debates to me. If you’re blippy or unclear, you’re going to be in trouble. As important as the technical line-by-line aspects of framework debates are, the explanation of your position on what debate should be, and the consequences to debate of a particular practice or position is just as important. If you want to debate about debate, then you need to articulate an impact statement about what debate should be. That being said, I’ve voted both ways on most framework debates, so you should defend the debate practices that you feel most comfortable defending, and not worry about my views of debate practices. Also, anybody who has ever heard me talk about framework debates knows that I would much rather have you go for substantive defenses of your methodology and practices rather than theoretical arguments about how the K is cheating.

Don’t assume that I have read and/or understood your author. This is generally a problem in K debates, where people assume that terms are packed with implicit meaning. If the argument isn’t in the text of the card, then you need to make sure that it is comprehensible in your analysis or explanation of the card. Also, remember that the evidence is not the argument by itself. I prefer quality of evidence to quantity. Two or three good cards will almost always beat ten bad ones. Even politics and econ uniqueness cards should (ideally) have warrants/reasons in them. Don’t highlight out the warrants of your cards, you should read the parts of the text that are important to the argument. Don’t expect me to reconstruct the parts of the card you didn’t read.