Rodkey,+Geoff

I'm a parent of a Public Forum debater at Bronx Science. I'm also a former high school debater with a year of experience in policy and two years of experience in Lincoln-Douglas. However, I graduated from high school in 1988...which makes my experience very far removed (both in time and substance) from L-D as it's currently practiced.

As of this writing (January 2016), my post-1980's judging experience is limited to two PF tournaments (one varsity, one novice) and one novice LD tournament.

Consequently, it's best to treat me as you would a parent judge with little or no experience. I can flow speeches, but spreading is largely incomprehensible to me (if you're going too fast, I'll try to indicate that so you can slow down to a speed I understand), and if you use too much shorthand/technical jargon, I may not know what you're talking about.

I'll give my ballot to whoever does the best job of developing and extending a clear line of argument across the debate, supporting their position and exposing flaws in their opponent's position in a manner that (ideally) a random person plucked off the street could understand.

In rebuttal/summary speeches, I'm most interested in hearing a distillation of the round into a few key voting issues. Less is more -- I'd much rather give a ballot to a side that makes two or three well-developed, eloquently stated arguments (or even one, as long as you have a good argument as to why that one issue is decisive) than a side that fires off a list of bullet points without contextualizing or weighting them.