I've been coaching and judging debate since 2010.

I can handle speed in speech as long as it's not blazingly fast. I will say "clear" one time as a warning if I can't understand you.

I will be keeping a detailed flow on my computer. I will flow your authors and a summary of what they are saying.

I value argumentation over style. I put emphasis on part of the round being improvised. Your speeches should be responsive to what has happened during the round. I do not like pre-written rebuttals, summaries, or final focus speeches.

When assessing a debate I consider clash over each contention and determine which contentions each time has carried through the round or pulled to their side. Then I will consider weighing arguments to make a final decision.

I am most persuaded by arguments that present clear and tangible impacts. I do not heavily weigh philosophical or semantical arguments and would generally prefer you provided more evidence rather than arguing about authors or publishers.

Please be courteous to your opponents. Speak to me and not your opponents. Do not talk to your teammate, use your cell phone, or make silly faces during your opponents speeches.

Please do not shake my hand at the end of debate I appreciate your appreciation but a simple "thanks" will do.

Experience: I am a senior at the University of Iowa where I study political science, international affairs, and philosophy. I was a competitor in public forum for 6 years and was the collegiate national champion in 2018. I have experience and working knowledge with all speech and debate events. I have previously coached in Des Moines, Iowa, and for NSDA China. I am currently unaffiliated with any team, school, or individual competitors.

PF: I value accessibility. Public forum ought to be an event that is able to be understood by any member of the public. Clear, concise communication at a reasonable speed is expected ie conversational. I WILL DROP YOU IF YOU TRY TO SPREAD. Each team will be given one warning on speed in the form of a dropped pen or calling out “Speed.” If spreading/speed persists after the warning I will immediately drop the team with the most violations. (If both teams accumulate one violation in their respective constructive, the next team to violate will be dropped.) I will flow cross-examination if you make important points. I value complex arguments and respectful clash. Being rude in my rounds is a great way to lose speaker points and a round.

Important things:

- If at all possible, I would like to start rounds early. I understand that's not always possible or teams need to prep, so I'm just appreciative if we do start early. No problem if you need to take your time though.

- While in evidence exchange, I expect all students to have their hands on screen and mics unmuted to ensure that time is not used for prep.

- Summaries should SUMMARIZE the round.

- FF should Crystalize not line by line, give me impact calculus and weighing. Impact calc within every speech is most persuasive.

- Summaries and FF should have voters not line by line.

TL;DR, Be respectful, conversational, bring solid evidence and analysis to my rounds and you’ll do fine.

LD/CX: Pretty much anything goes. I absolutely prefer arguments that are directly resolutional (ie not a fan of certain Ks, love me some T and theory though) but if the debate goes a certain way, it is not my place to wrangle it. LARP is chill. On the rare occasion, I may ask you to slow down a little bit or clear you, but that will not be weighed against you. I'm almost always good with speed. I prefer competitors disclose to ensure flow clarity. I will flow cross-examination if you make important points.

I competed in Varsity PF for two years at Hempstead High School. I’ve competed in and broke at nats, reached semis at the IFL State Tournament, done pretty well at locals, and went to ndf. With my low experience with judging, you should probably consider me a flay judge. Have preflows ready before round. I will probably disclose unless told not to. I use he/him pronouns.

Treat your opponents with respect. Rudeness will hurt speaks and in extreme cases can result in a loss.

My email is sameerfaruquee2002@gmail.com. I would appreciate being added to your email chain for evidence.

Flowing - I can flow pretty fast speaking. Just don’t spread please. If you do, you’re liable to kill your speaks and lose me on the flow. Please signpost as much as necessary. As for timing, I’m cool with a ten second grace period, but after that is when I stop flowing.

Evidence - Please do not do card dumps. Paraphrasing is fine granted the evidence is not misconstrued. I will only call for evidence in the case of possibly misconstrued evidence or if a specific card is critical in the round.

Framework - if there is no framework, I will assume a cost-benefit analysis.

Speeches - I’ll buy any argument given there is ample warranting behind them. If speaking first, do not cover your own case in rebuttal. Second Speaking teams should be covering both sides of the flow during rebuttal. Please do not give blippy responses or try to extend through heavy ink. I don’t do sticky defense. Collapse and extend in summary and final focus. I would prefer a single solidly extended warrant and impact than multiple weak extensions. Extensions should include articulating the entire link chain. The most important thing for me to vote for you is weighing, but be sure to explain your weighing. Don’t just say “we outweigh on magnitude”.

Crossfire - I’ll only flow something from cross if it comes up in speeches. Crossfire will affect your speaks

Progressive Arguments: I honestly don’t know much about progressive debate. If you do run something like Theory, warrant it just as well as you would warrant everything else.

I competed in pf throughout high school at Hempstead. My email is bryandkeck@gmail.com if you want to add me to an email chain. I’m a picky judge, so here is a paradigm to reflect that:

1. Tech over truth. What I mean by this is that winning on the flow is more important to me than the soundness of your argument (to me). Perhaps your opponents’ argument is somewhat implausible or completely bizarre. However, it’s your role as a debater to point this out and explain that to me. I never liked it when a judge brought their preconceptions to a round for the “truth” of an argument before it was even debated. That being said, don’t lie in a round. If I detect it, I’ll hold it heavily against your team. The other caveat to this is that you still need to justify a point for me to accept it in the flow. Tech over truth doesn’t just mean I’ll accept you saying “we save 100 million lives” with no context if your opponent doesn’t respond to it. “Tech” entails the proper use of warranting.

1a) This should be obvious but so many judges and teams make a silly argument that dropping a contention that lacks a turn somehow is a “voter” for your opponents. This is not true. The only way your contention becomes a voter for your opponents is if they’re able to turn or are prerequisite to it, and you don’t respond to it. Otherwise, it’s just a null point in the round and isn’t flowed. You don’t necessarily win a point just because your opponents don’t discuss it after your rebuttal. Remember, you’re supposed to collapse down to a few arguments and crystallize the round in summary.

2. Don’t misrepresent evidence. Call your opponents out if they misrepresent their own and ask me to call for the card.

3. I don’t flow crossfire. If you want me to evaluate something said in crossfire, it needs to be brought up in a speech.

4. Don’t spread or speed-read your case/speeches. I can flow quickly, but it’s difficult for me once you surpass, say, a 950 word constructive.

5. For rebuttal speakers, make sure to really implicate your responses in your speech. Don’t just read off evidence and expect me to understand how it interacts with the opponents’ case. Tech over truth but you need to use technical skills.

6. For rebuttal speakers, if you speak second, please frontline your opponents’ responses to your case.

7. For both speakers, please signpost in your speech so I know where to flow your arguments.

8. For both speakers, make sure to extend your voters from case and relevant rebuttal defense in summary and final focus. You should be extending the specific warrants and impacts. A failure to extend a contention in summary and/or final focus makes me unable to vote off of the contention. This is truly just a reiteration of (1). Again with (1a), though, this doesn’t mean I vote against you. It’s just dropped from the round.

9. Don’t just read off a framework. The default for a round is a cost-benefit-analysis. If you want a different framework for the round, you have to tell me why I should accept it - not just assert it. This parallels my caveat in (1), but I notice that just reading off a framework without justification is a prevalent problem on the East Iowa circuit.

10. I care more about warranting, extending solid defense, and link-interactions than I do about weighing. Weighing is important, so I’d do it, but most impact-calculus is so self-evident that it becomes redundant. I recommend weighing, but make it worthwhile.

11. I have a strong disdain for disclosure theory and kritiks. If you feel so compelled to read these, you should join LD or Policy or some other style of debate that has been overrun with such tiresome and bad-faith arguments. I’ll probably flow it, but I’ll be very inclined to accept even the weakest responses to it. Just don’t annoy me and use something else if you have it.

Updated Feb 2017

Yes, I want to be on the email chain, tewsie1@gmail.com.

If you are a team that has been judged by me in the past there aren’t many changes. This is mostly an update b/c I haven’t looked at this thing in like 7 years.

I don’t really have strong argumentative preferences. Do what you do best and I will give you my best attempt to understand what you are arguing. Complete arguments have a claim, warrant and impact (reason it matters in the debate). Incomplete arguments rarely make it into my decision.

I flow and I don’t really read speech doc until I need a specific piece of evidence at the end. I value line-by-line refutation and get irritated when arguments don’t line. Overview proliferation is annoying. Most of those args can just be made on the lbl. I also flow on paper so undeclared overviews destroy my flow.

Good impact analysis helps my decision. Spend a little time talking about timeframes and probabilities instead of just magnitude. Often times mag is a tie, so I need something to clarify the extinction v extinction debate, obviously.

I look mad all the time. I’m not actually mad. It has no bearing on how I feel about the debate or you as debaters.  If I am mad at you, you will know it.

Pet Peeves:

Links are links not Disads to XYZ. If you win a link that means the argument competes, it isn’t a DA to anything on its own.

Debaters should handle their own CXs. If they need help that is fine, but they should at least be given the chance to answer questions in their own CX.

You are 18-25 year olds, figure out how email works. Excessive time sending email will result in prep time restarting.

I find it kind of sad that debaters aren’t funny anymore. I reward humor with points. Obviously, you should consider audience and appropriateness but don’t take everything so seriously all the time.

CP/Disads

I don’t really have anything substantive to say here. You can outweigh the aff with a good disad you don’t always have to have a counter-plan but you do have to win case defense. It also helps if you explain the warrants of the case defense in relation to the aff impact claims (instead of just reading cards and letting me sort it out). In DA outweighs the aff rounds, you must have internals between your DA and the case impacts OR some really good defense. You also need to spend a lot of time on internals and TF/Prob differentials.  

Kritiks

I pretty much adjudicate K debates like I do disads, did you prove a link and does the impact outweigh. Also typically in K rounds I will ask myself at the end of the round if I can explain in plain English why I voted on this argument (to the losing team). In other words if you can’t explain a K in simple English it becomes more difficult (not impossible) for me to vote for you. Alternatives don’t have to solve the aff if they solve the K and it outweighs the aff.

Self-serving roles of the ballot are annoying. My ballot typically indicates who did the better debating. Sometimes that better debating means that you convinced your opponents that the ballot means something different, but for real that ballot doesn’t change just b/c you said so. Go ahead and play the game but like all other arguments you are going to have to win this. A simple assertion of a new role is not enough. If you want to change the role of the ballot you are going to have to have a rationale for why your role is good for debate/the round/has some justification that goes beyond “you want to win the round”.

Topicality:

It is a voter. I usually evaluate on competing interps. I can be persuaded by reasonability however I think that these args are deployed weakly these days. Reasonability is a value claim and as such you need to assert the value (i.e. we are reasonable) and then explain how to evaluate reasonableness (how do I recognize if something is reasonable). The aim of this should be to take the onus off of my moral system of what is reasonable/fair to me and put it more on an objective system for recognizing reasonability in relation to community norms. It helps if you have a vision for debate and can defend it and don’t just treat T/FW as an analytic disad.

Theory

I often struggle with theory debates because people blaze through them with no regard for pen time. If you want to win theory debate you have to have a clear link and impact and explain why the impact should merit the ballot. I won’t read your blocks, if I can’t understand it from the speech and my flow then it doesn’t count. 

First, a little about me. I have been judging public forum debate for about 10 years (does that seem possible). I am pretty straightforward in terms of what I look for in judging a pf round. Do you clearly state what your contentions are? Are the contentions directly related to the question that is being debated (this sounds elemental but I can remember a number of times that teams tried to bring up arguments with no direct link to the resolution.) I am judging public forum (not policy) so you don't have to try and impress me with how fast you can talk. As a matter of fact, excessive speed will work against you on my ballot.

Do you provide good blocks to your opponent's contentions or did you ignore or drop them? Do you make good use of the time you have available or do you leave time "sitting on the table." I do not do the elaborate flows that some judges do. My theory is that the more time you spend writing the less time you spend listening.

All contentions must be backed by evidence. You should always be able to produce your evidence for your opponent or me if it is requested in a reasonable amount of time. Inability to locate evidence will lower your chance of winning the round. Falsifying or misstating evidence will lose you the round.

I listen VERY closely to cross fire rounds. This is really the only unscripted part of the debate and I have seen many a close debate that was won - or lost - due to crossfire.

Finally, be professional in how you handle your round and treat your opponent. Facial expressions while your opponent is debating, rolling of the eyes, arrogance, being condescending etc. do not sit well with me.