LC Anderson 2022

UT Austin 2026

email for email chains:

carterhull@utexas.edu

Some information about me:

IE events from 2018-2022 for LC Anderson HS (Texas)

UT Austin Mock Trial Captain 2022-present

IE: All topics can be super interesting, but please make sure to always be aware of your surroundings and give proper trigger warnings! Monitor the speed of your speaking, explain your ideas clearly, and speak loudly.

Salvete, v'omnes! I primarily judge Congress and Extemp; most of my notes are going to be about those events. I have a general understanding of how every event works, but if you wind up with me in anything outside of Congress & Extemp, I'm a lay judge. Sorry. If you get me in those events, however, I did them for 3 years in high school and like to think that I know what I'm talking about.

Why should you be careful when buying wool socks?

Because you might get fleeced!

General advice

- Whether we like it or not, first impressions make a huge difference on how we perceive each other. Your introduction is the most important part of your speech: it's an opportunity to establish your individual style, show confidence, and keep everyone entertained (if that's your cup of tea); it's also an opportunity to absolutely blow it.

- These rounds are very long, and I have a choice selection of fun brain things that make me lose focus easily. I highly recommend that you keep your speech consistently interesting so that I do not zone out and miss what you have to say. This is obviously easier said than done, but try to vary your tone & pace, and don't cram too much information into your speech. Conclusions are also very helpful recaps in this regard!

Congress

I judge the worth of Congress speeches based off of how much they change the debate thus far. For a sponsorship or first negation, I want good, general arguments that can be built on by later speakers and that enemy speakers have a hard time refuting (I will go back and look at how influential the first speeches were). For every other speech, that either means introducting a new and significant way of looking at the topic or taking down a major obstacle to your side. Some takeaways:

- If there are really big impacts going on in a round, smaller ones don't really matter. If the impact of climate change is that the world as we know it ends, your impact about people losing their jobs is sad, but it isn't going to fundamentally change whether or not I support the legislation--that is, unless you can tell me why those big impacts aren't actually going to happen. If you can show how the really significant arguments don't work, your smaller arguments are suddenly more significant.

- If someone has already made an argument, don't spend time contextualizing what they've already established; use their point as a diving board and add something new.

- Tell me why your impacts matter more than the opposition's impacts

A lot of judges say they prioritize content over presentation; this is almost never actually true, because if your presentation isn't great my human brain and its biases will perceive your content negatively as well. There's a certain baseline of presentation I require to seriously consider ranking you up. However, don't expect to get away with a strong speaking style and not much else to back it up with (this is especially true in earlier rounds for certain hotshot competitors who just assume they'll break because they're "good").

If you do something unusual and interesting with your presentation and you do it well (e.g. really powerful lines of rhetoric), I will give you bonus points. However, this is not DI; yelling and crying about an issue you don't have a personal connection to is both disingenuous and exploitative.

I'm a huge fan of puns and other corny jokes; if you manage to work other forms of humor into your speeches I'll appreciate that too. That said, there are ways to make light of serious issues that don't diminish the suffering of people involved with those issues, and there are other ways that do not do that. I really don't want to hear another "mexican'ts" joke in my lifetime, thank you very much. Also, please be original!

Extemp

Not many people read Extemp paradigms, so this'll be a good deal shorter.

I will reward you for picking harder questions. Even if your speech isn't as spotless as someone who picked an obvious question, I will factor in the obscurity, complexity, and prevalence of established answers that you had to work with.

I was taught a very specific structure as to how an extemp speech is constructed. I don't deduct points from people who don't follow it super closely, but at the very least I want an introduction, multiple well-reasoned arguments with clear source citations and a conclusion. For what it's worth, though, the structure I'm familiar worth goes something like this:

- Hook

- Background (what's going on? Where? With whom?) & significance of the topic (why do we care?)

- Restate the question and provide your answer, giving a broad umbrella answer and specific statements that forshadow your points

- Two to three (usually three) well-organized and logically consistent arguments as to why your answer is correct, usually citing 2-3 sources each.

- Conclusion: Restate points, end by calling back to your hook, call it a day.

Give your arguments enough fleshing out to make them good! It's very easy to spend too much time (prep time, speaking time or both) on one or two points and rush through the rest. If you have one ingenious argument and then two mediocre ones, I'll rank you below someone who has three solid points.

That said, especially at higher levels of competition, it's not enough to give a coherent, functional, smooth speech; you need to do something to stand out. You might lose because you just got outcompeted, even if you don't do anything wrong. Here are some ways in which you can do that:

- Have genuinely interesting and cool arguments that teach me something I don't know about the world. (This is the method I like most.)

- Be really funny

- Be really dramatic

- Some combination of the above

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I apologize in advance as far as feedback goes; I can be kind of blunt, and I know a lot of people tie their self-worth to speech & debate in a really unhealthy way (I certainly did). Please keep in mind that I don't intend to make any judgements on you or your general capability; I'm trying to articulate why I did or did not like what you were doing and give you some things to think about with regards to your performance. Of course, these things are extremely subjective; feel free to disagree with anything I tell you. If you have any questions, feel free to email me at elijahjvk@gmail.com or text me at (+1)512-470-5425.