she/her

Can put me on the email chain: lauren [dot] burdt [at] gmail.com

Would prefer Tabroom's anonymized docs sharing if enabled

Background: I coached national circuit LD in Iowa and Nebraska until 2018. Have coached students to late elims of the TOC and NSDA Nats. I've mostly been in tab rooms and judging locally since then, so my threshold for speed and recognition of new arg trends has gone down since then. Debate's your game; I'm happy to be in the back of the room for whatever you prefer to do as long as we're all safe and having fun. In general, if you communicate clearly, are well-researched, show depth of understanding in the literature you are reading, and bring passion to the debate, I will enjoy whatever you have to present.

Couple specific things:

-Speed: Probably not keeping up with your top speed these days. Will yell slow and clear. If you're debating someone who asks you to slow down, I expect you to make your best efforts to ensure they can follow the debate.

-Theory/phil: Sure. This is how I debated. I enjoy framing-heavy debates that compare the applications of different ethical frameworks. Engagement > evasion; extensions of a dropped sentence fragment buried within a paragraph of analytics do not particularly excite me.

-T: Substantive topicality debates ("T as a turn to aff's method") typically fare better with me in the back of the room than "aff must read plan", but I'm down for whatever floats your boat.

-K: Sure. This is primarily what I coached. Feel like these debates have gotten more buzzwordy these days which is not a great strategy to pick up my ballot. I'm uninterested in imposing my own ideological preferences as a judge, and I'm open to experimentation with what debate can/should be. I judge a lot of clash debates.

-General: I'm not following along in the doc. I flow speeches straight down and I evaluate debates holistically. Explanation matters, judge instruction important, big picture storytelling good.

-Happy! I like it when debaters are nice to each other. The friends you make in debate will last much longer than your memory of Ws and Ls. Personality is fun, sass is fun, but I have a pretty low threshold for being frustrated with actions and behaviors that work against building community. Have fun, be smart, and I'll do my best to evaluate rounds the way you tell me to.