Mike Bausch

Director of Speech and Debate, Kent Denver

Please include me in email chains; my email is mikebausch@gmail.com.

Do what you do best, and I will try to leave my predispositions at the door. I have voted for and against every kind of argument. How you debate matters more than what you debate.

I care most about your ability to successfully communicate and defend your arguments by flowing, doing line-by-line, speaking clearly, and thoroughly explaining your arguments throughout the debate. The best tip I can give you is to go for less distinct issues as the debate develops and to focus on explaining and comparing your best points to your opponent’s arguments more.

Argument resolution is the most important part of debating. Making choices, explaining what issues are most important, identifying what to do with drops, answering “so what” questions, making “even if” statements, and comparing arguments (links, impacts, solvency, etc) are all examples of the kinds of judge instruction that winning rebuttals should focus on.

I value the research skills that debate fosters. I want students to demonstrate their topic knowledge and to utilize their specific research. I think a lot of teams get away with reading poor evidence. Please make evidence comparison (data, warrants, source, or recency) a significant part of the debate. Evidence that is highlighted in complete and coherent sentences is much more persuasive than evidence that is not.

I do not follow along with the speech document and will tell you clear if I can’t understand you. I am more likely to read evidence that is discussed and explained during the debate and will use the debater's explanation to guide my reading. I am unlikely to read evidence that I didn't understand when it was initially presented, or to give much credit to warrants that only become clear to me after examining the evidence.

The affirmative should present an advocacy that is grounded in topical policy and critical literature. The negative should clash with the affirmative. I am more persuaded by strategies that compete with ideas or positions the affirmative has actually committed to. I think many generic negative strategies, like process counterplans and “fiat not real” style critiques, are not automatically competitive.

My favorite debates to judge are debates where both teams demonstrate command of their arguments and make choices that maximize clash in the debate. I think affirmative plan vagueness, lack of solvency advocates, and strategies based around reading the resolution as your plan text and then reading solvency evidence that doesn’t assume the plan as written produce low quality debates. I think extreme negative conditionality, lack of solvency advocates, and reading incomplete arguments significantly reduce the quality of many debates.