Mani,+Nitya

Nitya Mani Freshman at Stanford Experience: 4 years debating in HS

Do what you are good at, be polite to the other team, flow and you will succeed. I try to leave my predispositions at the door, and will do my best to resolve debates based on what I have flowed. That means it is your burden to be clear enough that I can flow what you are saying.

CP/DA/Case: Great kinds of debate. I believe that you can win a 0 risk of a disadvantage, and that in order to win, impact calculus is essential. You can make significant headway to mitigating case and DA arguments through smart analytics. Additionally, attacking internal link and extinction-level impact scenarios can drastically reduce the risk of any argument you are defending. I think that permutations, intrinsicness, and other often blippy affirmative responses are not arguments unless they have a claim and warrant.

K: Contextualize your critique to the affirmative through specific links and framing; I am much more likely to grant weight to affirmative responses if your explanation of the critique could be the same no matter which aff you were debating. I am a 2N, and as such I am familiar with some breadth of common literature, but if you are extending any highly theoretical critical position, don’t assume I know what you are talking about. I believe that affirmatives should defend the implementation of a topical plan, although they may advance critical reasons for doing so, but I can be persuaded otherwise.

T/Theory: I am not a huge fan of theory debates, largely because they tend to be block dumps of analytics at insane speeds; make sure to engage the other team’s arguments if you are extending theory. I generally think one conditional advocacy is definitely okay and most theory violations are a reason to reject the argument not the team

Some other notes about debating: You have to provide a copy of your evidence to the opposing team Having a speech document does not absolve you of flowing; it is extremely frustrating to hear teams respond to arguments in the speech doc that weren’t made or drop analytics because they weren’t flowing. CX should be conducted by the two people who are supposed to be conducting it. Barring the occasional interjection to check for the status of an advocacy or an emergency, debaters should not interrupt their partner’s CXs. Treat CX like a speech.