Tomasi,+Adam

I'm a Policy debater at Wake Forest University, entering my junior year. I did national circuit LD for all of high school, and I coach LD (and Policy less frequently) for Lexington High School in Massachusetts. This summer, I worked at the RKS Debate Workshop and judged a ton of debates on the 2017-18 education topic.

Email chain: tomaaj15@wfu.edu

I used to have separate paradigms for LD and Policy, but I think it's more helpful to give universal comments on how I actually judge debates.

1. **I care a lot about evidence**. I will read through most, if not all, of the cards at the end of the debate. I won't insert arguments into the debate based on what the evidence implies, but I can't vote for you if your explanation of the evidence is based on some misreading. I do this to encourage you to know your cards well and utilize them the best you can. Unpack your warrants and be comparative; use lines of your own and your opponents' evidence to flag important arguments that matter to my decision.

2. **The final rebuttals need to "write" my ballot**. You need to present to me a story of why you've won the debate at the top of the 2NR/2AR. You can't just get deep into the flow and expect me to sort it out. Ironically, the debaters who don't want me to "do work" are the ones who often fail at this. The earlier speeches should really develop your arguments, and the later ones should describe the big picture. Talk about the arguments that you've //already won//, based on everything that happened previously in the debate.

3. **I'm more willing to vote on theory if you can demonstrate in-round abuse**. In-round abuse is not "they did this thing that violates the interpretation," it's "here's my interpretation for debate, and here's what they did in the debate that demonstrates how abusive their practice was." I think a theory argument is frivolous if it's purely based on potential abuse.

4. **Use all of your speech and cross-ex time**. I will dock speaker points if you use cross-ex for prep, or if you end a speech early. I think that there's always more you can ask or say about an argument, even if you're decisively ahead.

5. **Judging LD last year, out of twenty-five prelim and elim debates,** **nine of those prelim decisions I gave were low-point wins**. That's because I think how well you spoke or engaged the debate doesn't strictly correlate with the win or loss, depending on how the arguments played out.

6. **I'm willing to evaluate any argument on its merits, but some argumentative biases are unavoidable**. Thinking about a variety of arguments and literature makes debate fun for me. However, I have to be honest about my biases. I'm partial to framework against affirmatives that are blatantly outside the topic. In clash debates, I'm partial to big-stick Policy affs vs. the K. I'll vote for the K/the non-topical K aff if you debated it well, and the Policy/framework team didn't do the sufficient work to win the argument. For example, if a team is going for Framework but they didn't really articulate any impacts, I'm more inclined to vote for the K team.

An important caveat: for me to "evaluate" an argument, I'll really have to consider the tech //and// the truth of an argument. Hypothetically, you might be spreading someone out, but the other team's arguments are simply on the right side of the issue. I decide that based on the relative quality of the evidence/the analysis, making a provisional judgement on whose position was "correct." This is different from simply voting based on my personal opinions, which I would never do. To actually //judge// a debate, however, I have to make a decision based on what's presented to me. There's an inevitable element of subjectivity, because judges are human. That means that **persuasion** is an important element of debate and my decisions.