Updated 2024, following Greenhill

Dr. Brice Ezell – The Lovett School, Debate Coach (he/his)

Speechdrop is preferred, but if it's email do add me to the chain -- my email is brice.ezell@lovett.org

I competed in Lincoln-Douglas debate in California and a little bit nationally for my four years in high school, and another four years in the WUDC format at George Fox University. My PhD, though in English, centered on philosophy, so I’m comfortable and familiar with much of the critical/theoretical literature used in theory-heavy LD cases. At Lovett, I coach LD and PF, though I mostly judge the former. [PF-ers: type “what about public forum” into your search bar, or scroll to the bottom, to see my paradigm there.]

The TL;DR below should honestly suffice for most folks. The page below is long (though I've tried to clean it up some) but I treat this paradigm like a running document where I put out answers to questions I get more than once, so that hopefully this page gets to a place where it'd answer basically any question before the debate happens, to save the debaters any time in asking me questions before the round. My general tip would be if your question boils down to one debate jargon term (e.g. "skep" or "RVI"), search that term on the page and -- ideally -- I'll have something written.

TL;DR Summary of Everything in this Paradigm: In general, I will vote on whatever is most successfully warranted, weighed and impacted in the round. Arguments can have all sorts of impacts: to the fairness of the debating activity, to the possibility of nuclear war, to violating a universal ethical principle, etc. However you impact your arguments, you also need to sell me on some kind of standard by which I am to evaluate the in-round impacts. This doesn’t mean you have to use the old-school value/criterion structure, but rather that you as part of your weighing need to tell me the yardstick by which to measure all the in-round impacts. Absent any clear standard from the debaters I will default to a post-AC utility calculus, meaning I assume the AFF happens, and then I weigh the impacts claimed in the round by both sides.

Prefs: Though I hesitated to do this at first, as I don’t want debaters to get the sense that they have to run one kind of argument in front of me to succeed, below is how I’d rank my preferences when it comes to LD. I recognize there is value to being transparent about this as a judge, though I really try to be tabula rasa in-round as this is an activity whose practices are created by its participants. Debate is as much a creative as it is an academic activity. Unless I state some reservation with a particular argumentative style below, run what you want to run! Just because my #1 is my #1 doesn’t mean I automatically privilege those cases against anything below it, especially if other options are run more effectively. The 1-5 category below is all stuff I like hearing in rounds, so even though, e.g., I like phil the most, that doesn't mean you need to run phil to win my ballot. I like good arguments: a great skep argument will beat an okay phil argument, despite my preferences. And I'm very open to the possibility of being won over by a great debater with one of the argumentative categories where, at present, I have a bit of resistance.

I Like These/Vote on Them Regularly

1. Philosophy

2. Policy (LOVE plan/CP debates)

3. Post-fiat K debates

4. Theory

5. Truth-testing

I Am Definitely Open to Voting for These But Make Sure You're Doing Them Well

6. Skep (moral or epistemological - big fan of args involving the latter, actually)

7. Performance (though I stress one thing: make sure you know what the word "performative" actually means)

Not Saying I Could Never Vote on These, But I Have a High Threshold for Being Sold on Them, So You Better Be Sure You're Confident in Your Ability to Run Them

8. Pre-fiat Ks

9. Serious gaming

I Can't Imagine Voting On This Ever

10. Tricks* [see note below]

*I know there may be some confusion in having tricks ranked at the bottom here and skep/truth testing in a higher level of willingness to adjudicate. To put it frankly, I’m not totally clear on what constitutes a “trick” – it’s a confusing set. If by “tricks” one means whatthis definition on Circuit Debater tells us, wherein a trick is an argument that’s meant to be abusive/hard to respond to, then I will say without reservation I will vote these kinds of arguments down. As a general practice, irrespective of the style of case one runs in front of me, I reward debaters for running toward the debate, rather than trying to win on the narrowest grounds possible. Go for clash! With that in mind, I’m not clear why truth testing and skep cases *must* constitute some kind of trick or attempt to be abusive to your opponent. Truth-testing is a flavor of old-school LD, and done well is hardly abusive, certainly not in a way where an opponent couldn’t sufficiently respond to it.

Stray Things

Speed: I’m good with it but be exceptionally clear on your contention and card tags.

Tech>Truth?: Yes, though when I'm listening to and flowing your arguments, they need to, at some level, make sense. So if you're running a K or otherwise philosophically inclined argument with its own jargon, explain what key terms mean and what they look like applied to the debate at hand, even if you think I know the body of literature from which you're drawing. An example: feel free to run a psychoanalysis K in front of me, but if you read some tagline that's like "The alternative is to run towards the Real," like... I'll flow it, but I don't know what that means unless your tag or card gives me some explanation of what that would look like. You shouldn't be clarifying key claims of a case only in the rebuttals. The strategy of obfuscating in the 1AC/NC and then in rebuttals being articulate in the way you should have been in the constructives will bode poorly for speaks in front of me.

Cross-x: Is binding. I flow it and think it’s one of the most important parts of the debate.

Flex-prep: I’m cool with it.

Timing: I trust debaters to keep their own time but note that I will keep time as well (a) as an extra accountability measure in case there’s a dispute, and (b) because I like to make note on my ballot of how speakers allocate their time strategically.

RVIS?: Probably not.

Disclosure: I am indifferent on disclosure, and thus have a higher threshold for disclosure theory as a line of argumentation. I also find it unlikely that I’d vote on something that didn’t happen within the specific confines of the round I am assigned. HOWEVER, if a tournament has a stated policy mandating disclosure, I will honor the tournament rules and vote on any well-warranted disclosure theory shells calling out the offending debater for failing to comply.

Extinction: Is bad, of course. But in debating, I really do think extinction as an impact creates a race to the bottom argumentatively, and I would encourage any debater whose opponent runs extinction in front of me to examine the warranting cards with even *mild* scrutiny and they should be able to outright scuttle the impact or at least de-link from it. I know we're told to go for the biggest impact, but I'm more likely to vote on a "less bad" but nonetheless awful impact with a tighter link story than an impact that relies on a long train of logic to arrive at extinction.

Speaks: Upon arriving back into debate, I discovered that my old idea of the speaker point band (25-30, with 27.5 as a solid average) is a bit curmudgeonly given contemporary standards for speaker points. After some recalibration, here's where I'm at, except in cases where tournaments specify an in-house point spread.

30: No notes. If I were a betting kind of person I'd bet you're going to win the tournament.

29.6 - 29.9: Near-flawless strategy and delivery. If this kind of performance is repeated, I'd expect you to get to late elims at this tournament, if not win the tournament altogether.

29.2 - 29.5: Your strategy and delivery mark you as a debater I'd expect, assuming consistent performance at this level, to get solidly far into elims.

28.8 - 29.1: I'd expect you to break or be close on the bubble for the break based on how you executed strategy and delivery in this round, assuming consistent performance at this level.

28.4 - 28.7: I'd award in this range if I thought it possible that you might break, but there are strategic or delivery issues that I could see being an issue in other rounds.

28.0 - 28.3: This is where I start my adjudicating of a round. A debater who stays at this score level is merely "fine" -- nothing too bad, but nothing too flashy either. I would not expect a debater consistently competing at this point level to break.

27.0 - 27.9: You've got a lot of work to do, either in strategy or delivery.

26.0 - 26.9: You've got a lot of work to do in both strategy and delivery.

25: You did something profoundly offensive.

One sure way to get good speaks from me: quality on-case argumentation and engagement with the opponent's cards and tags. Not to say that, for instance, a NEG has to win a debate on case arguments against the AFF, but I too often feel that even good debaters hear the tag of the AC (e.g. "oh they're running X policy case"), and then rather than engage the substance (or maybe lack thereof) in the AC, will go only for off arguments and leave little time against the AC. Go for your offense, of course, but show me that you're engaging your opponent's case in detail! Put most succinctly, debaters that get good speaks for me eagerly go for clash.

What About Public Forum?I am generally of the belief that PF should be insulated from the "circuit-ification" that's endemic to the other major debating formats. A PF round really should be viewable by all, including the mythical "average person on the street." This isn't because I'm a "PF originalist," or am against spread/circuit debate -- far from it. Rather, I just think the strictures of the form (four minute speeches max, topics that change every month) make "circuit PF" a kind of contradiction in terms. PF should be about a clearly defined and persuasively delivered (in the traditional sense) clash on a current events topic with which a parent uninitiated to debating could follow. Though PF doesn't have the value framework of LD, your weighing mechanism for my decision in the round -- these are often called "voters" or "voting issues" -- should still be clear by the time you get to the Final Focus speeches.

And to reiterate something I said above, but in a PF-specific fashion: the crossfires, especially the grand crossfires, should be the most electric part of the round. Please don't turn cross-x into a back-and-forth of basic fact-finding questions: really get into the debate there!

One specific note on the rules of PF debating, since this issue has come up in some rounds for my debaters: the CON is not required to defend the status quo. Though plan texts are verboten in this format (for the PRO and CON), the CON is allowed to advocate (without a specific plan-text) alternatives to the PRO advocacy. For example, on a topic like "The United States federal government should forgive all federal student loan debt," the CON is not required to defend a world with no student loan forgiveness or only the types of forgiveness that exist in the status quo; they could say, as a generalized claim, "We support some targeted means-testing style forgiveness programs, those that target historically disenfranchised groups in America." There couldn't be, however, a specific plan iterating the details of that advocacy. I'm not sure why so many people think PF would be set up to where all debates are "X or the status quo," and in any event there's certainly nothing in "the rulebook" for PF to suggest that the CON can't offer alternatives in the same generalized way that the PRO advocates for a given case.

I like philosophy and theory.