Limaye,+Adi

Aditya Limaye Bellarmine ’12 Berkeley ’16

This philosophy mainly consists of stylistic, rather than substantive preferences—in other words, I don’t care much what arguments you read, but rather how you present and defend your arguments. Do what you’re good at and I will work hard to fairly evaluate the winner of the round.

Card clipping, cross-reading, and argumentation that is blatantly offensive (rape/racism good or other arguments of the kind) will result in an immediate loss and 0 speaks. This includes just saying "mark it there" in your speech without physically marking the speech doc (you won't lose for this, but you will annoy me, lose at least one speaker point, and have to take prep to actually mark all your evidence and then re-flash a marked version to the other team).

Clarity comes first—I’m fine with speed and enjoy a fast, technical debate, but debaters who don’t take the time to work on their clarity often don’t receive high speaker points and often fail to persuade me of the merits of their positions.

Slow down on theory and topicality debates—both of these are, in some cases, (notably excluding arguments such as ASPEC/no neg FIAT), good arguments if well thought-out and well-executed. Affirmatives on recent topics not only have gotten worse at answering topicality arguments, but also have moved towards the margins of the topic that are questionably topical. At the same time, the negative has moved towards process counterplans and bad PICs that make it nearly impossible for the affirmative to win a debate. Please, do impact calculus on both of these arguments and make the debate specific and I’ll be more than willing to vote for you.

Framework is up for debate just like any other issue in the round. If you're a team that reads an aff without a plan, or is sketchy about defending the plan, be ready to defend it against the framework arguments the neg brings up. I don't really have a specific substantive preference either way on the framework debate. Stylistically, however, doing impact calculus on the standards debate and explaining how your arguments actually clash with the other team's makes the round much easier to evaluate.

Presumption sides with less change, not necessarily with the affirmative. This is a “soft” preset and I have heard arguments as to why siding with less change is good (see: Thomas Hodgman). The degree of “change” is always hard to quantify post-round, so please don’t make me intervene and highlight if your CP does less than the aff (if you think the debate will be close).

I reward hard work, both in terms of speaker points, and in terms of the amount of credibility I lend to your argument. Case-specific strategies (critical or policy) with great evidence show hard work—generic strategies with poorly warranted evidence can often be beaten with smart analytics.

Offense/Defense is a great way of organizing arguments, but perhaps not an impeccable way to evaluate a round. I’m willing to assign a very high risk of defense, to a point at which the offense the other team extends is just background noise. In other words, making smart defensive analytics is almost always a good idea in front of me.

Paperless Rules—prep ends when the flash drive is out of your computer. I know that pretty much everyone has computers nowadays, but if a team doesn’t have a computer, then the paperless team is required to furnish them with one before the speech. Paperless is one of the best things that has happened to debate—please don’t use it as an opportunity to cheat and read ahead in speech documents.

For those who absolutely want argumentative preferences, I was a big DA/CP/case debater in high school and enjoyed well-researched, case-specific strategies. Most of the coaching I do now, however, is mainly related to critical argumentation, which, if explained and understood well, can be very interesting and certainly has a place in debate. Of course, any and all of these arguments need to be executed well technically to give yourself the best chance of winning. Again, please don’t let these preferences guide your argumentative choice—the former part of this philosophy is much more important than this last paragraph.