Blank,+Thad

Thad Blank (07-08) Affiliation: Missouri State and Carrollton School of the Sacred Heart

I tend to view debates in terms of offense versus defense. This dominates how I evaluate arguments, including T and theory. I think the judge should strive to fairly evaluate whatever arguments the debaters choose to make in the round. However, it is disengenous not to recognize that we all have certain biases that color our views. Here are some of my judging quirks, roughly in order of most strongly held to least: 1. An utterance must meet a certain threshold to be an argument. The line by line is a convention designed to facilitate clash, not make it irrelevent. I.e. sometimes, even if you say something three times, and the other team never answers it, it still doesn’t mean you win the debate, if that particular utterance makes no sense, is irrelevent, is patently offensive, or is clearly answered on another sheet of paper. 2. Offense vs. defense is the way of judging arguments that makes the most sense to me. This might make me different than many judges mostly on T: When all the conventional args for “reasonability” vs. “competing interpretations” are stacked up, it looks like a crush for “competing interepretations” to me. The aff is in trouble if they do not have offensive justification for their interpretation of the topic. Also, I do not foresee the day when I vote on presumption. 3. I may have a relatively low standard for allowing cross-applications between arguments. When one team makes an argument that clearly also answers something said by the other team, it seems uneducational to claim that we should ignore the obvious because it wasn’t said in the right place, or wasn’t said twice in a speech, especially if the other team still has at least one speech left in which to answer. 4. Permutations that test the competition of CPs and Ks are probably not voting issues. “Vote against the argument, not the team” makes intuitive sense, and “you made a severance perm, VI” is not a winner unless it is repeatedly dropped. 5. Extra-T is probably a voter. It seems true that the time the neg would have to invest to prove that part of the plan should be severed makes it impossible to win another argument in the debate. Other things that are perhaps relevant: --I judge and cut cards on both the high school and college topics (more the former). --I am not really a crusader for or against the K. I don’t read very much critical literature, so I am a less literate judge in those debates. It usually seems to me the aff needs to make inroads against the alternative to have a chance of winning. In framework debates, the aff needs to be sure to impact the argument. It is hard to win this is a voting issue, thus it is important to explain how winning the framework argument impacts the negative’s ability to access their alternative. --C-X is important, and I try to pay attention and even write down answers to key questions. Very occasionally, I get involved in a CX when one team is being evasive about something it really seems like they should answer, or when some sort of basic misunderstanding is unnecessarily muddling the exchange. Yes, I do want to be Dallas Perkins when I grow up. --The trend in impact comparison has swung toward quantity at the sake of quality. It is time for the pendulum to swing back toward parsimonious, quality impact comparison. So much of what is said is useless because it lacks recognition of what arguments are actually being won or lost in a debate, is generic (i.e. not truly comparative), repetitive, laughably untenable, unwarranted or unevidenced. --Please properly and fully cite evidence. Cards that excerpt sections of text need this noted in speeches (i.e. you have to say “it continues” out loud).