Waizer,+Josh

I debated for Edgemont High School (my final topic was national service) and have probably judged about 50 rounds a year the the last three years, first for Edgemont and then for Lexington. That’s gone down a bit this year - I’ve judged at Lexington, Scranton, and some Lexington practice rounds - so my familiarity with the topic is a bit more limited. That means don’t expect me to understand lots of acronyms or abbreviations or have a great idea of how the community has been treating the topic so far. I’m a senior at Brandeis University and an economics and political science major - that may or may not help you get an idea of how I think.

The easiest way to get my ballot is impact calculus. This can be the terminal impact to a disad turning or outweighing the case, why your T standards are more important, why the turns outweigh the links, why you win in their framework, etc. One of the biggest problems I have in debates is when each team tries to win every aspect of the flow and they don’t address what happens when they each only win some arguments. Hedge your bets, tell me why you win even if the other team wins X argument and you’re much more likely to win. One of the biggest problems I have with teams that do manage to do this is that their impact calculus is not comparative. Talk about your impacts in the context of their impacts rather than just why yours is bigger.

Evidence: Research is an important component of debate, and good research should be rewarded. I place a high value on evidence quality and analysis, but you have to know your evidence. Tell me the warrants and I’m much more likely to take it at face value, and more likely to interpret it favorably for your if I do call for it. Do comparative analysis between your evidence and theirs, and specifically how your warrants interact with theirs. I’ve seen teams read evidence that directly quotes their opponents evidence and not realize it. That’s silly. Logical arguments and smart indicts of the other teams evidence are also valuable. If both teams read great cards and move on, you’re forcing me to resolve it somehow, and someone will be unhappy with the outcome.

Argument preference: In high school I took politics and case, generic counterplans and well researched pics, and sometimes T. My ideal debate is a pic that solves most of the aff with a very specific net benefit. A good politics and case debate is a close second. That being said, some of my favorite debates recently have been K debates, and that has been because the negative has had short overviews with good impact calculus, steered away from the jargon, tailored their links specifically to the aff, and did a good job on the alternative debate. If that is how you debate the K, I’m probably a fine judge for you - if you can’t do that, I might still vote for you, especially if the aff is stupid and drops something like no value to life, framework arguments, or doesn’t realize the alt is a floating pik, but I won’t be happy about it.

If you are affirmative plan texts are good and your aff should relate to the topic. If you are negative, in general I’m a pretty big fan of traditional policy debate. If you don’t do these things, I’ll vote for you if you win - and I have on numerous occasions in the past - but it’s a bit of an uphill battle.

Theory: In general you can do what you can justify, and my default is to reject the argument and not the team unless told otherwise. Arguments require warrants; “they’re intrinsic that’s a voter” is not an argument. I’m a fan of the counterplans need a solvency advocate/basis in the literature argument as a reason to reject the counterplan. I also think reasonability is good (and by that I mean you need to meet a reasonable interpretation of the rez and not necessarily the best one - not that you can be 80% topical, that’s stupid) but teams do a bad job making that argument and I usually end up evaluating T debates in a competing interpretations framework.

Speed and Clarity: Speed is fine, don’t go faster than you’re capable so that you sound unclear. I have a bit of an issue with paperless debate when it affects clarity - if you’re hidden behind your computer screen or you read your entire speech in a monotonous voice at the same speed so that it becomes unclear, it will hurt your speaker points as well as risk me missing something on my flow. It also might subconsciously affect my decision since you’ll sound less persuasive. I think more teams do this now that they are switching to paperless, but plenty of teams still manage to speak quite well so it’s clearly avoidable.

Please don’t take 5 minutes jumping stuff to the other team. I don’t think it should be a part of prep time, but you should be able to do this stuff pretty quickly by now.

 josh.waizerATgmail.com if you have any questions.