Last changed on
Fri February 12, 2021 at 7:16 AM MDT
Updated: Buffalo Battles 2021
This will be my 11th year in the debate community. I competed for 4 years in high school, 2 in middle school, and three years in college. I've done various judging and coaching jobs since. I'm not familiar with the literature on this years policy topic at all.
When it comes to a preference of arguments I really am open to anything as long as it isn’t morally repugnant: sexist, racist, homophobic ect. arguments.
I ran pretty much every type of argument out there. I have a preference to Kritikal debate. I have a low threshold for T. I have a deep love of performance debate. Give me reasons why you aren't going to debate the topic if you're going to ignore it. I'm super game for that type of debate but I need to see the reasoning behind why your performance should supersede the topic. Given that policy has a year long topic I'm very receptive to arguments that talk about the importance of this tournament or location of tournament. That said I have a love for traditional debate as well. If you want to give me a plan on counterplan debate I'm absolutely open to hearing it.
I evaluate the round through framework. Just because you lose this part of the debate does not mean you lose the debate as a whole. As long as you can prove that you fit the winning framework better than your opponent I will give you the ballot. In fact I find kicking out of arguments to be an extremely effective way to win debate rounds.
VOTERS!!! At the end of the round please give me voters. When I sign the ballot I don’t generally write that one person just won everything on the flow. Give me a couple options as to why I should vote for you instead of going over everything. You could lose all but 1 or 2 arguments but as long as you can show me that that argument or arguments outweigh when looking to the framework I will still pick you up. I love impact calc. Please do the work for me; I don’t want to be left at the end of the round trying to decide whether econ collapse outweighs 10,000 people dying. Tell me specifically WHY yours outweighs. Probability, Timeframe, Magnitude typically are the way I've seen this done.
LD Specific
Traditional v. Progressive. I really don’t have a preference as to which form of debate is better. As long as it is organized and well developed I believe anyone can beat anyone regardless of their form of debate. I love to see a good value value criterion debate. Though a poor one makes me really sad. As above, winning the framework of the debate will be extremely important to how I view the round. I find that LD debaters tend to forget to debate the framework even though that is what separates LD from other types of debate is it's specific focus on framework.
Speaker points. Most of the time I give high speaks based on how well you debate in your particular style. For example if you are a progressive debater I probably won’t be judging you too much on eye contact. And the same goes for the other side, if you are a traditional debater I won’t be judging you on how many cards or how fast you go. Across the board as long as you’re making great arguments and debating your style well you will get high speaks.
