Stearns,+John

I competed in LD debate in high school from 1987 to 1991. In 1991, I was a quarterfinalist and top speaker at TFA state. LD debate was a transformational activity for me. It took me out of an inner-city world into a completely different culture. LD debate teaches students how to persuasively articulate their point of view to either a person or group of people which has a huge impact on the students ability to succeed in business, politics, or law. I reentered the world of debate in 2012 when my sons began debating. Obviously, the world of debate had changed significantly during that hiatus. It took me a few years to adjust.

CX debate:

I consider myself a Tabula Rasa judge. I do my best to vote based on my flow. Please send me your speech docs. I have found that it improves my flows. Also, I have found that I am usually ok with speed, but I have problems with clarity. When you stumble, double-clutch, and sputter, I miss arguments. When I have to say clear, I miss arguments on the flow. So basically if speed causes your clarity to decline, slow down. If you are smooth as silk, speed should not cause me to miss your arguments.

I consider debate a game. Most games( football, soccer, baseball, monopoly) have rules. The only rules that exist in debate are the allotted times per speech. You make up the rest of the rules. Please do not pull a George Lee, ignore the time like at CEDA Nationals 2014. I will vote you down for that. Please know that I expect every argument to have a claim, warrant, and impact. Otherwise it is a position that I will be unlikely to vote for.

K: Personally I am not a huge fan of the K in CX. It just fits better with the LD resolutions than CX in my opinion. However, I am happy to vote for a K or listen to a K debate. I would appreciate if you could articulate the world of the alternative and why that world is better than the status quo or the world of your opponent. I am very open to all K arguments both alt right and alt left. If you can't beat racism good, than you probably deserve to lose the round.

Performance: These debates can be very enjoyable to watch. Please make sure that you are making an argument.(claim, warrant, and impact) Warrants do not have to be carded in my opinion. In fact I think many carded warrants in debate are simply published claims.

Theory: I am fine with theory. As I said earlier, debate is a game and you make the rules. Theory is all about how the game should be played.

CP: I am fine with counterplans. In my experience these usually devolve into a theory debate. Strong net benefits will help your CP.

DA: In my ideal world, I would want to listen to a policy debate about the plan text's positive and negative net benefits.

Impact calc: If you use this as your crystallization process, please define it for me. Unless I am told differently, I tend to weigh probability much higher than magnitude. In other words, if you are going for existential impacts. Please have an argument about how important magnitude is in weighing an argument.

In your final rebuttals, it is very important that you write the ballot for me. I need you to clearly articulate why you are winning the debate. I need you to tell me what arguments to vote on, why you are winning the arguments, and why the impact of your arguments benefit society more than your opponents.

LD debate:

Very similar to my CX paradigm. Except you have to do a little extra work if you chose run a policy case in LD. If you run a policy, please provide a framework for why a policy case is important.

In my ideal world It would want to listen to a Value/Criterion debate that is rooted in philosophical argumentation.

Note for both: Also be careful with too much jargon, it is a poor way to communicate. If I talked about market caps, PE ratios, PEG ratios, DCF's, slow stochastics, MACD's, rsquared, betas, alphas, head and shoulders, candlesticks, 10k's, etc. You would probably have a hard time understanding as well.