Short,+Eric

Eric Short (updated November 2009) Wayzata High School 5 Years Coaching College, 9 Years Coaching High School

100 point scale: I have only had limited experience with this (read 1 college tourney). I am willing to use guidelines set out by a tournament to judge my new points by. If no such rubric is given, I will default to the one that makes most sense to me. 27=70, 27.5=75, 28=80, 28.5=85, 29=90, 29.5=95, etc

I judge debates in the way they are presented to me. This means you control the substance of the debate, not me. As such, anything is open for debate; the team that will win is the team that is best able to explain why their arguments are better than the other teams. Impact analysis is extremely important at the end of the debate. You probably won’t like the decision if I have to decide what is most important in the round.

What follows are my predispositions about certain debate arguments. These are not necessarily truths, but if equally strong arguments are presented on both sides, I often default to the following beliefs.

Topicality—is an evidentiary issue about competing interpretations. Each side needs to explain the types of cases their interpretation allows (or does not allow) and why that interpretation is best for debate. T is a voting issue, unless there are compelling reasons why it shouldn’t be. And I haven’t heard many of those yet. I think most critiques of topicality are debated at such a shallow level (you said T so you should lose) that they often function on the level of RVI (which is not a good level to be on). Throw-aways and T’s designed to arbitrarily exclude the aff are a waste of good 1NC time.

Critiques—I am familiar with much of this literature, as I coach and ran these arguments as a debater. The more specific to the Aff your critique is, the better. Even if you don’t have evidence, you should be talking about the assumptions/representations of the Aff and why they are a link to your criticism.

CP’s—Especially on this topic, you probably need a CP. Or, if you don’t at least CP out of something in the 1AC, it will probably be hard to give a 2NR that outweighs the Aff. Dispositionality is probably better than conditionality, but conditionality is fine. PICs are fine. CPs that PIC out of something not in the plan text (consult, conditioning, etc) are probably cheating. But, Negs often win that their CP is theoretically legitimate not because it is, but because the Aff usually just gives in.

DA’s—I prefer case specific DA’s to generic ones, but all generic DA’s can (and should) be made specific to each case. I think too often Aff’s give too much credence to 3 card 1NC’s without questioning the uniqueness of the impact, the internal link to the impact, etc. I tend to think “risk of a link” is debate shorthand for “we haven’t found all the evidence for our DA, but we wanted to run it anyway.”

I rarely look at evidence after a debate. When I do, I am a) looking for cites or b) doing some fact checking. This does not mean I won’t look at evidence, but most teams do not do the type of evidence comparison required for me to look at it, and when they do, the other team hasn’t done it, so there is no reason to check the evidence.

Speed is not a problem, lack of clarity is.