Herro,+Steve

Steve Herro Georgia State University I debated in high school and college and coached intercollegiate debate from 1990-1992 and 1994-1999. I have not been involved in debate since then, although I did judge some debates at the 2005 and 2006 GSU tournaments. I expect that you treat your opponents, your partner, and me with respect (this should be standard procedure when you are debating in front of a judge you don’t know). If something is going on that I really don’t like, I will let you know. I tend to give pretty strong non-verbals and am comfortable interrupting debaters mid-speech if necessary. Using hostility and/or making the other team uncomfortable, and other such approaches to debate, are strategies that have __negative persuasive value__ for me. I think it is very important that the debate round not be a turned into a hostile environment. If you think something might happen in a debate that could create a hostile environment, please discuss your concerns with the other team and, if necessary, in my presence, before the debate. Notice that this applies to both teams: If you think you might be uncomfortable with an argument or performance that you anticipate might be made in the debate by the other team or if you think you might make arguments or performances that could make the other team or me uncomfortable, you should discuss your concerns with the other team. I will get involved in the discussion if any of the parties (including myself) deem it necessary. I will take what I believe to be any level of unwarranted hostility, uncomfortableness, etc. into account when deciding speaker points and who I will vote for. I know this is fairly vague, so err on the side of caution and talk to each other and/or me. In my opinion, any debate strategy that is meant to have “transformative effects” on the participants of the debate should be disclosed before the debate. And I have to admit that I am skeptical of this approach to intercollegiate debate. A simple example of this is a “speed critique”: If you think debate is better if debaters don’t talk fast, I think it’s most productive to talk about this with the other team before the debate. If they agree there is no need for the argument in the debate, and if they don’t agree then you have a good basis to make the argument. In any case, you would still have to win the argument but you have almost zero chance of winning it with me as the judge if you didn’t give the other team “fair warning.” At least two things haven’t changed from my coaching days: my goal is to be fair and to make the best decision possible given the resources I have at my disposal. I think there is some point at which taking longer to make a decision has diminishing returns for me. I will explain my decision to the best of my abilities and in some cases may offer suggestions for improvement. I will happily engage questions about my decision, and I won’t mind too much if you don’t agree with me. I can’t flow as well as I used to, but this is getting better as I watch more debates (I have judged at GSU, Kentucky, and Vanderbilt in 2007). You are more likely to win the debate if you make good arguments and I understand them. I will verbally tell you if I do not understand you or if you are just too fast for me to flow. Overall, focus on clarity and you should be good. If your tags are long and complicated, you should slow down and be extra clear when reading them. My main difficulty in flowing a well-articulated speech is when rebuttalists speak too fast. Obviously, the 1AR gets some leeway here, but even that speech would be better for me if it was slower. I am not overly concerned with the line-by-line minutiae: what I mean by that is that I don’t need or expect any speaker to answer every single statement the other team makes. I am very concerned with significant, well-supported arguments. The 1AR, 2NR, and 2AR would do well to focus on the most significant arguments in the line-by-line. One other note about flowing: In the past, I have struggled to flow fast critique teams with long, complicated tags. I don’t find long overviews particularly helpful in most cases, especially when you end up saying “that’s in the overview” over and over again on the line-by-line. I much prefer that you apply the overview arguments where they belong on the flow. I am somewhat annoyed and amused when a road map starts with “First, I am going to answer their overview, then I am going to have my own overview” because what usually happens is the overviews take up a substantial amount of time and then the rest of the speech is filled with redundant statements followed by “that’s in the overview.” I do prefer the 2NR and the 2AR to have tight, well-explained overviews about why they should win the debate. These should address macro issues (how the case outweighs the disad or vice versa, etc.) and include “even-if” statements (“Even if we are only winning a small risk of the disad, it still outweighs the case because…” or “Even if we lose the counterplan, the disad still outweighs the case because...”). Near the end of making my decision, I compare my resolution of each main issue in the debate with each second rebuttal to see which one lines up better. So if the 2NR’s overview is, in short, “the disad outweighs the case,” and my resolution of the disad and the case agree, I generally vote negative. I make decisions based on my understanding of what debaters say, so I need to understand you. I tend to not look at evidence after the debate unless there is an actual controversy about what a piece of evidence says, or if there is a substantive debate that makes concrete claims of comparison about the quality of evidence. “Their Smith ’07 evidence is terrible. Our Jones ’07 evidence is phenomenal” is not a substantive debate nor does it contain concrete claims of comparison (and to be honest, when I do read evidence after the debate, I am oftentimes at a loss to match the tag with warrants in the evidence). Since I don’t read much if any evidence after the debate, you would do well to cut the number of “Author in year” statements you make. Restating key lines from your evidence to prove how phenomenal it is and/or reading their evidence out loud and identifying its deficiencies to prove how terrible it is will get you much farther with me. Doing the latter often makes for an excellent and sometimes entertaining cross-examination. I am more comfortable judging “traditional” policy debates than critique debates. I haven’t seen any performance debates so I can’t say much about them. I am open to “alternative” (“non-traditional”) approaches to debate, but since I don’t have much if any exposure to the theory behind them, teams debating these styles will need to do more work to orient me to the argument(s) and/or performances. I will be happy to reveal as much as I can before the debate about what I know or have been exposed to.