Chiu,+Kimberly

High School: Houston-Memorial HS I debated for two years for Memorial and have attended TOCs both years. I broke at every TOC tournament that I've attended except for one (Grapevine '08). I also attended VBI session 1 for debate camp in 2008.

I'm not a picky judge at all, and there is nothing specific that I enjoy hearing more of (critiques, theory, etc.) I'm pretty much open to any case- traditional or not. I'm fine with speed as long as you're CLEAR. You can't expect me to flow well if you make it hard for me to understand you.

Offense/defense: I, (as well as 99.9% of the other judges out there, I'm sure), expect you to focus more of your time on making offensive arguments rather than wasting a large portion of your speech time on defensives ones. Make sure that the defensive arguments you make are absolutely necessary, otherwise don't bother because it really isn't that important to me when it comes down to voting. Obviously that isn't an open invitation to drop a bunch of stuff, but I would like to see more focus on offense rather than seeing you struggle with time management and trying to squeeze in *unnecessary* defensive args.

PLEASE always give a road map- I hate when debaters just expect the judge AND their opponent to just know where they're going in their speech. (I know that sounds silly even having to ask for a roadmap, but I've come across a ton of debaters who would never give a roadmap and would have to be interrupted by the judge and asked for one).

Word economy is very important to me, as it should be to you too. It's not fun sitting there trying to make out what someone is trying to say or what point they're trying to bring across because of poor word economy. Granted, not everyone has great word economy BUT it is definitely refreshing to be able to flow rebuttal speeches quickly and concisely.

Again, I'm really not picky. If you want to run theory, critiques, counter plans, on/off, etc. then go for it. If that's not quite your style and you're more of a traditional LDer, then that's perfectly fine with me too. I enjoy all styles of LD so don't hesitate to run whatever it is that you want to run!