Wells,+Jacob

I enjoy this activity. There are few places where students are able to develop critical thinking skills to such an extent. As such, I think this activity is much more about you than me. I encourage you to do what you do best and I will do my best to adjudicate based on the round. Time is of the essence and I won't leave you reading a 40 paragraph philosophy.

Offense/defense is a weird way to make decisions. There is such a thing as 100% defense.

Negatives: You are either winning the link or you're not. What is a risk of a link? Impacts outweigh is not a substitution for winning the uniqueness/link.

Affirmatives: I will most likely not vote for you if your defense of your affirmative comes down to "try or die." If negatives are able to substantially mitigate your case then you have not done a good job defending why I should vote for you.

This is one of those areas where your impact framing is very important. If I am given two big impacts with no ability to weigh them against each other, you force me to decide which is worse. This is bad for all of us.

Theory

These debates are often muddled. If you want to go for theory, then you really should be line by lining the responses. Teams have to do whatever they can to win so I'm not going to hurt your points for making a strategic decision.

Topicality: Reasonability is not an assertion that makes topicality go away. It's a way for the judge to evaluate the interpretations in the round. I am not going to assume you're reasonable just because you said so. I will default to competing interpretations in those cases.

Evidence I'm not going to read 50 cards after the round. That doesn't mean i wont call for evidence. This is still (in my opinion) a communications activity and you should be using the evidence to make your arguments. I also think many judges read evidence contextually between the lines when the argument hasn't been made in the debate. This means if the other team's evidence makes alternate causalities or draws different conclusions, you should point that out. I am not going to make the argument for you. It's unfair to your opponents.

As for the rest: each debate is different. Do as you please. Paperless is probably good. It has cut down travel costs and allowed for schools with tighter budgets to get the most bang for their buck. I will allow you time to save/jump speeches and the like. Try not to waste everyone's time. Judges know when you are stealing prep. Try not to curse in front of me. It doesn't make you more persuasive and it could hurt your speaker points.

I pay attention to what you say in cross-x.