PLEASE USE SPEECHDROP OR TABROOM SHARE.

TL;DR:

• Josh, Friess, whatever, but ideally not "judge" (he/him)

• Coach at Avery Coonley, a Chicago-area K-8 school with a middle school program (our more experienced kids often compete in HS JV-ish) and a start-up high school club

• Former national circuit high school policy debater from the mid-1990's, ~20 year break, getting close to fully back up to speed now. I've worked to ensure my speaks are very close to modern national norms despite my age.

• Good for policy args, T, theory, CP's, all that

• That said, less jargon, more explanation on theory is helpful

• I've been told by “K debaters” that I am "not good for the K". (You know who you are… :-) ). I think this approximately half-correct, with some key nuance attached:

• I’m actually quite willing to vote for your arguments, on either side, which is heavily supported by my actual voting record. The primary issue is that I often don’t understand your arguments.

• You can help this dramatically and therefore substantially enhance your odds of winning by:

• Slowing down – like, maybe even way down.

• Using less jargon and instead explaining your arguments in as simple of terms as possible.

• Offering more thorough explanations than you might otherwise.

• Having arguments that are well-organized -- signposted and responsive to the other side.

• Creating and explaining a linear path / logic chain to the ballot that is supported by the flow.

• If you’re unable or unwilling to do the above, while I will do my best to be objective, there’s a reasonable chance my RFD is “I didn’t understand your argument, I’m voting for the other side.” This is true even if you clearly "sound" better.

With all that said, my general approach is to assess the round based solely on the arguments presented by the debaters, with as little intervention by me as possible, and where tech dominates truth. The remainder of this paradigm should be viewed in that light -- that is, it's a heads up on my general perspectives on debate that may or may not be helpful to you, but if we're all doing our jobs well, my perspectives shouldn't really matter and shouldn't enter into the RFD.

The specifics below are really intended to highlight a handful of areas where my own views or capabilities may differ from other judges.

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Flowing / speed / clarity: I flow on paper. Please don't start your speech until you've given a roadmap, and until it's clear that I'm ready.

If you're an experienced high school debater, please know that my ear for speed is maybe only 90% of what it once was. I would suggest going a little bit slower everywhere except the body of cards. (That said, I do pay attention to what is read in the body of cards, and only consider a card to be evidenced to the extent that it is actually read in the round.) You certainly don't need to be at normal-person conversational speed, but taking 10-20% of your speed off may be helpful to you.

It is extremely helpful when debaters include some sort of unambiguous verbal indicator at the end of a card and before the following tag. A very brief pause is a start. A simple and clear "Next" is better. While it may be old-school, and very slightly inefficient, I'm still partial to some sort of number or letter in early constructives, particularly because numbers and letters allow for easier signposting in the line-by-line in later speeches. (Though, I also tend to hate 1-a-b-c, 2-a-b-c, etc., unless the sub-structure is highly related to itself, e.g., CP theory.)

There's an extent to which line-by-line seems to be a lost art, as does flowing. To an extent, I'll try to do the work for you and see if a given argument has in fact been dropped, but the best way to ensure that my flow has you covering everything is to signpost everything, and respond / extend in the order of the original line-by-line, i.e., the 1NC on-case and the 2AC off-case.

Please send speech docs. Ideally, we should be using share.tabroom.com, speechdrop.net, or similar. If for some reason that is not possible, I will provide my email address before the round. In middle school and high school novice, my standard policy is to *not* follow along in the file, and I won't read cards unless I need to do so at the end of the round in order to assess some question of evidence. At the high school JV and Varsity levels, I'm more willing to follow along in the speech doc in order to do my part to adapt to you. But, I still expect clarity, signposting, and modulating speed on tags and cites.

Also, particularly at the high school JV / Varsity levels, I would strongly advise against reeling off multiple blippy analytics in the course of several seconds. If you do so, then if you're lucky, I will get one out of every four arguments on my flow, and it may not be the one you want the most. If there's a round-winning argument that you need me to understand, best to explain it thoroughly rather than assume I will understand the argument based on just a handful of words. This is all the more true if your delivery relies excessively on debate jargon, the more modern forms of which I may not yet be familiar. Please trust that I'm doing my level best, and that I'll be able to follow you when you're explaining things reasonably well.

In the end, if it's not on my flow, I can't assess it as part of the round, even if it's in your doc.

Kritiks: I have no principled opposition to voting on kritiks. This includes kritiks on the Aff. I do think Aff has the burden of proof to win definitively that they do not or should not need to have a topical plan. That is a burden that I have seen overcome, though the more of these rounds I see, the tougher this sell becomes for me. Regardless, in the end this is a question that I'll resolve based on the flow.

I'm arguably not clever enough to understand many kritiks -- I dropped the philosophy major because I couldn't hack it, and became a physics/math major instead -- so persuading me to vote on the basis of a kritik may require a fair bit more explanation than you would typically offer. I will take no shame in telling you that I straight up didn't understand your argument and couldn't vote on it as a result. This most likely occurs if you overly rely on philosophical jargon. If anything, my lack of experience relative to other judges in this particular debate subspace probably provides a natural check on teams reading arguments that they don't understand themselves. I'll posit that if you can't explain your argument in reasonably simple terms, then you probably don't understand it, and shouldn't win on it.

I'll say as well that I've judged a number of K teams that seem to rely heavily on blocks that have been prepared fully in advance, or maybe very slightly tweaked from what's been prepared in advance, with little attempt to actually engage with the other side. First, I find these speeches pretty tough to flow, since they're often extremely dense in content with little attempt to engage with their audience. Second, I happen to think this over-reliance on advance-prepared speeches is rather horrible for the educational value of the activity. It pretty severely undermines the "K debates are better for education" argument, and it also acts as a fairly real-time demonstration of the "link" on "K debates are bad for clash". I'm likely to be highly sympathetic to an opposing side that has any reasonable degree of superior technical execution when K teams engage in this practice.

It might be worth you knowing that K's were not really a thing yet back when I was debating. Or rather, they were just in their infancy (particularly in high school), rarely run, and/or they were uniformly terrible arguments that I don't think are run much anymore (e.g., Normativity, Objectivism, Foucault, Heidegger). Teams argued the theoretical legitimacy of the Kritik, and whether or not they should be evaluated as part of the ballot, but these arguments weren't unified under a notion of "Framework". Alt's definitely weren't a thing, nor were Kritiks on the Aff at the high school level.

Disads: I've quickly grown wary of Neg's erroneously claiming that their disad "turns case". There's a crucial difference between a disad "turning case" (i.e., your disad somehow results in the Aff no longer accessing their own impact, and in fact, causing their own impact) and "outweighing case" (i.e., your disad simply has a shorter timeframe, higher probability, or greater magnitude than the case). I've become increasingly convinced that Neg's are simply asserting -- unwarranted both in fact and in claim -- that their disad "turns case" in the hopes of duping the judge into essentially making the disad a litmus test for the ballot. If your disad legitimately turns the case, then that's awesome -- make the argument. However I think bona fide claims of "turning case" occur far less often than Neg's want us to believe. In the end, this is not much more than a pet peeve, but a pet peeve nonetheless.

Stolen from Yao Yao: "Uniqueness only 'controls the direction of the link' if uniqueness can be determined with certainty (e.g. whip count on a bill, a specific interest rate level). On most disads where uniqueness is a probabilistic forecast (e.g. future recession, relations, elections), the uniqueness and link are equally important, which means I won't compartmentalize and decide them separately." -- Yes, exactly this. I'd go a step further and claim that on certain disads where uniqueness is probabilistically bound to a range that is far from both zero and 100% (e.g., elections, which is usually at best 70% unique and at worst 30% non-unique) then uniqueness is effectively irrelevant, and only the direction of the link matters. At the end of the day, I'm trying to evaluate net risk.

CP's: Counterplans need a solvency claim/warrant, but not necessarily a solvency advocate, per se. That is, if the CP's solvency is a logical extension of the Aff's solvency mechanism, no solvency evidence should be required.

Rehighlightings: I am perfectly fine with you summarizing why the other side's evidence doesn't say what they say it says. I do not see a need for rehighlightings to be explicitly "read into the round". Why not? Well, if Side A is reading evidence that is mishighlighted, taken out of context, etc., Side B should have to do as little in-speech work as possible to make the argument. Side B shouldn't need to waste their speech time reading the correct parts of Side A's poorly highlighted evidence. Side B still needs to explain what Side A's evidence actually says, and tell me what I should be looking for in reading the card. In other words, it's insufficient to simply state "their card is mistagged". But, "their card is mistagged; the author is actually saying X,Y,Z; here's why that matters" is generally sufficient. Of course, if Side B is the one who's actually misunderstanding the evidence, or worse, intentionally mischaracterizing it, that's not a great look and is likely to result in lower speaks.

Theory / Ethics / General Behavior: I tend to be more sympathetic to teams launching legitimate, well-reasoned, and thoroughly-explained theory arguments than it seems many more modern judges may be, up to and including "reject the team, not the argument".

When it comes to ethics and general in-round behavior, it seems that many paradigms contain a whole host of info on what judges think debate “should” be, how debaters “should” act, and/or the judge’s perceived level of fairness of certain tactics.

My own paradigm used to contain similar info, but I’ve since removed it. Why? Because I think including such info creates a moral hazard of sorts. Debaters that are predisposed to behave in certain ways or deploy certain tactics will simply not do those things in front of judges that call them out in their paradigms, and then go right back to engaging in those behaviors or deploying those tactics in front of judges that don’t. To the extent that judges view themselves at least in part as guardrails on acceptable behavior and/or tactics, it seems to me that a better approach to rooting out negativity might be to put the onus on debaters to be considerate, ethical, and reasonable in deployment of their strategies and tactics – and then, if they aren’t, to mete out appropriate consequences. I do not feel obligated to state ex-ante that “X behavior is an auto-loss” if reasonable judges would conclude similarly and respond accordingly.

Don't worry: I'm not looking to be arbitrary and unreasonable in exercising judicial discretion, nor am I looking to insert my own opinions when teams engage in behavior that's debatably unfair, but goes uncontested by the other side. Just be thoughtful. It’s great to play hard. But if your tactics are questionably fair or bad for debate, be prepared to defend them, or reconsider their use. If the other side is deploying tactics that are questionably fair or bad for debate, make the argument, up to and including “reject the team”. I will evaluate such arguments and their implications based on the flow.

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With all of that said, I consider myself to be in the midst of getting back up to speed in the modern norms and conventions of our activity, particularly at the high school Varsity level. I'm more than willing to be convinced that I should rethink any and all of the above, whether as part of an in-round debate or out-of-round conversation.

riley.rosalie@gmail.com ; 7 years of policy debate experience

University of Wyoming '21 | Current MPA Student at the University of Washington '26

Debate Coach at Weber State University

Over the last few years of judging policy and CARD, I find myself being a big picture type judge. While I still believe that a dropped argument is true and I can follow tricky framing arguments on the flow, debaters need to provide clear judge direction in the rebuttals on what those arguments mean and how I should deal with them at the end of the round. I am most persuaded by teams that go for fewer arguments in the rebuttals, spend time impacting/fleshing them out, and telling me how it implicates the rest of the debate.

Impacts need to be fleshed out in the final speeches. I need to know what is triggering the impact, where some war is happening, why it's uniquely coming now, etc. I find myself voting for teams that spend a lot of time in the final rebuttal giving me specific details on their impacts, how they can be avoided, and doing impact comparison with the other team. Same goes for more structural impacts. Use your evidence! The details are there but they need to be brought into your analysis.

Case engagement is one of my favorite aspects of debate. I find the block not spending as much time on case, and it makes the debate a lot closer than it should be. If you read one off vs. a policy aff, reading impact defense, solvency take outs, and evidence indicts to these policy teams will go far in front of me. If you are aff, I am persuaded by teams that know their ev in/out and consistently talk about their aff (thorough impact explanations/comparison, drawing me a picture of what the aff world looks like, talking about the aff on other sheets, etc).

If you want me to vote on a role of the ballot/judge, there needs to be clear weighing and impact extension as to why this plays an important role in the debate. Evidence comparison and indicts are also great weighing mechanisms that I find are underutilized.

For kritiks v. policy affs, I prefer teams that give extensive analysis of their evidence and provide specific examples to contextualize their link with the aff, rather than dumping a bunch of cards or shadow extend arguments. If you read psychoanalysis or other high theory, I am going to need a lot of explanation on some basic concepts so please keep this in mind.

With counterplans, I default to judge kick unless told otherwise.

If you want to have some fun with what you read, I am all for it! I love impact turns including nuclear war good, untraditional styles where you’re playing games instead of debating with speech times, etc. – so long as there is a metric for how I as the judge evaluate the debate I am here for it.