Keenan,+Ryan

Debated for four years at Juan Diego, second year at the University of Michigan

Debate how you want to, I'll try to evaluate your arguments to the best of my ability. Historically, I have gone for policy arguments - I love a well executed debate about a disad versus the aff - but I have also gone for the k fairly frequently. I'm less familiar with critical literature, but so long as you explain your argument well, that really shouldn't be a problem. I have fairly little experience with performance/alternative style debates, I'm willing to listen to these types of arguments, but I genuinely believe that policy debate is a good thing, and I think it may be fairly difficult to convince me that this is not the case. Ultimately, you shouldn't let me influence how you debate too much - make smart arguments, engage and respond to your opponent, and have fun and you should do all right. I think the best debates are about the case. This doesn't mean you have to go for case turns, but I think you should try to engage the case as much as possible whatever your strategy. That's pretty straight forward if you're just going for a DA, when you're going for a CP it means making specific comparisons between your solvency mechanism and the aff, and with the K it means being specific about identifying parts of the 1ac that link. I will reward this type of specificity with better speaker points. Line-by-line is a really good way to debate. You should do it. It will significantly hurt your speaker points if you don't.

A note about speaker points - I am fairly new to judging and am still figuring out what the norms are in this regard. For now, I'll say that 28.3-28.4 means you've debate proficiently and spoken well. Anything over 29 means I think you're in contention to be a top speaker at the tournament.