Short,+David

Name: David Short Affiliation: St. Mark’s School of Texas, Dartmouth College

My role as the judge is to evaluate the arguments presented in the round and pick a winner. I’m willing to vote on all manner of arguments, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to be happy doing so. I’m certainly capable of picking you up because they messed up on your lame theory block, but you’re probably not going to get great speaker points because of it. I’ve got plenty of experience in the high school debate world, but this is my first tournament on this topic, so I may need a little more information on whatever the hot argument of the year is. Basically, all I really want is for you to know what you’re talking about, and be capable of expressing this in your speeches and cross ex; please don’t pull out the sweet new critique someone else on your team wrote that you don’t understand. I tend to lean aff on T, but that doesn’t mean you can’t win it; you just may have to work a little bit. I was a 2n, so I’m going to be very harsh on new 2ar arguments. I increasingly find overviews to not be worthwhile, but if you have some unique perspective to offer in my evaluation of the round, go for it. I’m going to prefer warranted comparison of evidence to who has the best evidence, and will rarely call for cards unless there’s some dispute between the teams about what they say. The team that does a better job telling me why the arguments they’ve won in the round are comparatively better than the ones they lost will be better suited to win than the one who just has more ink on the page.