Brough,+Taylor

i am a senior at the university of vermont. in high school i debated for denver school of the arts. i've also coached there for the past couple years. paradigm writing is funny and sort of useless because it really doesn't tell you very much about how i judge debates. but: i guess i tend to view all debates as performances. (obviously reading a topical usfg plan action with a nuclear war impact is a performance. and so is doing something like advocating a poetic reading of the resolution.) i don't think affs have to be topical. but if you read a topical aff, please don't change it just to debate in front of me. i won't automatically vote against you because you relate your shit to the resolution. same with reading framework against affs that you interpret as non-topical. just make nuanced, complex, and comparative arguments and i will evaluate what happens in the debate. in my experience, when an aff is not topical (and the neg also doesn't think the aff has to be topical) the framework of competition in the debate often shifts. sometimes it is to your advantage in these debates to frame for me how i should evaluate competition. here are two framings that come to mind (that don't really exist in "topical" plan debate in the same ways): 1) "method debate": this is a real thing but i think is often used as a buzzword rather than to talk about the changes in clash that "method debate" framings bring up. for me, "method debate" means that you don't have to have a link or linear disad to the affirmative. this is substantiated often because the aff is not topical, and topicality is usually about whether or not you have links. typically, my conception of the method debate is one in which two teams attempt to confront or grapple with a similar issue (sometimes white supremacy writ large, sometimes antiblackness in debate, sometimes decolonial pedagogy, etc etc) through different strategies. i'm not sure what the function of a permutation is in method debates (seems weird if we don't start with the assumption that the aff has to prove a link), but i imagine i could be persuaded towards a permutation in some rounds. i've had a lot of method debate rounds. 2) "proving the aff is a bad idea": i like this framing as well, and i've used it a lot. this means that the neg doesn't have to advocate a plan of action but just has to show me how the aff is a bad idea. i could also be persuaded by arguments from the aff that those kinds of debates are bad (makes it really hard to ever be aff, means that you have to defend against all of these links and rarely have opportunities to create offense other than really specific link turns, it's easier to criticize than defend anything so the neg doesn't have to do a lot, etc). i think most debates are primarily adjudicated off of ethos. that doesn't mean 'interrupt ur opponents in cx constantly in order to give the illusion of control' (though it also doesn't mean 'if u do interrupt ur opponents constantly i will definitely vote against u') it means that the extent to which judges (myself included i think) believe arguments has to do with how you have performed them. idk if that's advice or anything, it just feels true.