10/25-11/1: LD & PF Tournament Results and Circuit Debaters Ain’t No Different
Lincoln Douglas Debate
Tournament Results
This weekend, LD debaters competed at two bid tournaments: the Florida Blue Key Tournament and the Meadows School Tournament.
Congratulations to American Heritage Broward’s Mason Cheng for winning the Florida Blue Key Tournament. In finals, Mason defeated Lake Highland Prep’s Harris Layson on a 2-1 decision (Bishop, Burke, Lopera*). Additional congratulations to American Heritage Broward’s Spencer Swickle for being the top speaker.
Full pairings and results can be found here.
Congratulations to Peninsula’s Devin Lai for winning the Meadows School Tournament. In finals, Devin defeated Harvard Westlake’s William Liu on a 3-0 decision (Mimou, Fox, Cryan). Additional congratulations to William for being the top speaker.
Full pairings and results can be found here.
Public Forum Debate
Tournament Results
This weekend, PF debaters competed at four bid tournaments: the Florida Blue Key tournament, the University of Michigan tournament, the Tim Averill Invitational, and the Quarry Lane Invitational. Here are some notable results:
Congratulations to Nikhil Reddy & Vivek Yarlagedda from Southlake Carroll for championing the 2023 Florida Blue Key tournament. In finals, they defeated Michael Hansen & Alex Huang from Durham on a 2-1 decision (*Aristizabal, Guarnieri, Merkel). Additional congratulations to Durham’s Michael Hansen for being the top speaker.
Full pairings and results can be found here.
Congratulations to Justin Wang & Eleyn Xiong from Canyon Crest for championing the 2023 University of Michigan tournament. In finals, they defeated Emilian Lipnevich & Riya Mehta from WW-P on a 3-0 decision (Kirsch, Simha, Thurnell). Additional congratulations to Canyon Crest’s Justin Wang for being the top speaker.
Full pairings and results can be found here.
Congratulations to Katherine Xue & Grace Li from Richard Montgomery and Jason Chae & Cailyn Min from Bergen County Academies for co-championing the 2023 Tim Averill Invitational. Additional congratulations to Newton South’s Navaa Malihi for being the top speaker.
Full pairings and results can be found here.
Congratulations to Sonya Chamberlain & Deeksha Vaidyanathan from Dublin and Ananya Pinnamaneni & Esha Bindlish from Dougherty Valley for co-championing the 2023 Quarry Lane Invitational. Additional congratulations to Dougherty Valley’s Akshat Ubale for being the top speaker.
Full pairings and results can be found here.
Best of luck to everyone competing next weekend! Stay tuned for future tournament results.
November/December Briefs Are Now Available
November/December briefs are now available to download for both PF and LD. If you've already purchased the briefs, or they are included in your membership, you can download them by logging into your account at classroom.victorybriefs.com.
The public forum topic is “Resolved: The United States federal government should forgive all federal student loan debt.”
The Lincoln-Douglas topic is “Resolved: The United States ought to prohibit the extraction of fossil fuels from federal public lands and waters.”
If you want to purchase the briefs or subscribe to a year-long membership, click here.
Circuit Debaters Ain’t No Different
by Jacob Nails
Most resolutions used in Lincoln-Douglas debate make statements that would be interpreted by the average person as broad and sweeping generalizations, such as “Resolved: Justice requires open borders for human migration” (Jan/Feb '23) or “Resolved: States ought to ban lethal autonomous weapons” (Jan/Feb '21).
It is nonetheless quite commonplace at many high-level tournaments to see debaters on the affirmative side defend these resolutions by way of a singular example or a small number of them, such as by arguing that Africa in particular ought to have open borders or that lethal autonomous nuclear weapons be banned. The negative side frequently objects that isolated examples don’t prove these resolutions true. This debate has been raging for many years now.
A typical argument in favor of this practice has been that the burden of the affirmative in the debate should be understood as something less than proving the literal truth of the resolution, such as “be[ing] an example or instance of the resolution” or “fall[ing] within the bounds of the resolution” on grounds that such a model of debate would better ensure fairness and/or education in the round.
In a recent article, Chen and McLoughlin take a different approach, arguing instead that these specific plans do entail the truth of the resolution-as-worded if we interpret the resolution according to the unique grammatical norms of national circuit Lincoln-Douglas debate rounds. I believe this argument ultimately does not succeed.
The article’s first premise is a defense of descriptive over prescriptive grammar, i.e., that the focus of grammar should be analyzing how individuals actually talk rather than judging them by idealized rules governing proper speech.
To me, this point seems essentially correct. Topicality is a question of what the resolution means, not what it ought to mean, and the best gauge of that is looking at how it is actually interpreted. When I want to clarify my intuitions regarding a newly released topic, I find myself asking other people I know (often non-debaters) what they think it means and whether they would consider it true or false under certain conditions. I don’t generally bust out an English textbook in search of obscure rules that I was hitherto unaware of, and I suspect most other folks don’t either.
The primary function of the resolution is to serve as a Schelling point for debaters, coaches, and judges around the country, who all have an interest in converging on a common understanding of what is to be debated. To that end, the goal should be to identify the most intuitive and straightforward interpretation of the topic that anyone could recognize. To use the authors’ example of double negatives, in the event that a topic were worded “Resolved: There ain’t no reason states oughta have lethal autonomous weapons,” I think most readers could identify this sentence as expressing an injunction against LAWs, and so that’s what oughta be debated. An affirmative deciding that they should be allowed to defend that LAWs are good (on the grounds that the negations should “technically” cancel out) or a negative objecting that the resolution is incoherent because “oughta” isn’t a “real” word would be engaging in unnecessary and unjustified pedantry. It’s clear enough what the sentence means, and that’s what matters.
I find that many debaters infer the opposite message from topicality—that the negative side must be telling them they should have followed the most elusive but “technically” correct interpretation that only a linguist with a PhD in Grammar could identify. From that perspective, it does seem reasonable to ask why one should care about a rule that almost nobody at the tournament would even be aware of. This impression presumably arises from the fact that many negative debaters do end up citing people with PhDs in Grammar in the course of making their topicality arguments, but I don’t think it’s the right takeaway.
Imagine someone you’re debating flatly asserts not only that they have a fundamentally different understanding of basic grammar than you, but that most other people would agree with them and you’re the outlier. What would you do? You can assert the opposite, but how do you prove it? If you don’t want to be a prescriptivist who appeals to old textbook rules, then you might want to find a source analyzing how people actually tend to speak. But as Chen and McLoughlin note, descriptive grammar is “the grammar most often used in… linguistics,” so it should come as no surprise that those highfalutin academic linguists will frequently make the best sources, even if the goal is ultimately to figure out what Joe Sixpack would think. That’s what they tend to study.
It would be wrong to draw the implication that one must have a background in advanced linguistics to understand the resolution. You can arrive at the best answer with high accuracy by simply reading it and asking, “Huh, what’s that mean to me?” After all, that’s the same question the experts are trying to answer. Novices in lay debates in front of parent judges manage to do it all the time without reading any Sarah-Jane Leslie. If these sources crop up more regularly at the national level, it’s mostly indicative of the prevalence of debaters on the opposite side who will deny basic facets of grammar that then provoke their opponents to research detailed responses.
Ultimately, I think the descriptive approach is the right one, but it’s already the approach that topicality implicitly takes, at least the best version of it.
The first place the linguistic defense of subset affirmatives errs is in its second premise, that the national circuit ought to be analyzed in isolation. Even if it is customary in most parts for the affirmative side to read the text of the resolution in their first speech, it is not their utterance of the topic wording that assigns affirmative and negative burdens, and topicality is not a quest to figure out what they personally meant by repeating it. The topic is laid out months in advance by the National Speech and Debate Association’s topic committee and governs Lincoln-Douglas debates at all levels of competition. If topicality is a descriptive enterprise of discerning what the resolution means rather than importing our preferences onto it, I see no reason to think it was written with exclusively the national circuit in mind.
Even at national circuit tournaments, the pool will include some proportion of local debaters, local coaches, parent volunteers, and so on who might travel to one or two major tournaments in their region per topic but aren’t actively keeping tabs on the vagaries of who’s reading what at the elite levels. At some tournaments like Harvard and Berkeley, that proportion can be quite high. A model of topicality in which the very meaning of the resolution itself is determined by detailed knowledge of the metagame rather than the plain meaning to the average listener means that a non-negligible number of participants won’t even know what is being debated at the tournament they’re paying entry fees for (and might not even know that they don’t know, expecting to debate the topic wording they were given), which seems as unintended as it is undesirable.
There is an asymmetry here that only cuts one direction. Even if national circuit debaters would prefer to debate narrow plans on every topic, they are not likewise unaware of how most other folks will interpret those resolutions (and in fact tend to strategically switch to generic cases if in front of a lay judge for exactly this reason), and so the plain reading of the resolution doesn’t create the same inability to reach a common understanding. A truly “bottom-up” approach to understanding the topic should focus on how novices, volunteer judges, and debaters without dedicated coaching squads—in essence, any average person—would naturally interpret the topic’s wording, not how the already most successful debaters do (or how they claim to in round, motivated by strategic incentives). And it seems perverse that a big enough school or prep squad can make their plan ipso facto topical by the act of reading it, as long as they make up a large enough portion of the pool to warp the meta around themselves.
Chen and McLoughlin criticize generic resolutions as being worse for debate on account of being too ambiguous, among other issues. While it is true that most Lincoln-Douglas resolutions have historically been worded as generic generalizations, to affirm topicality as a rule is not to say that this always is or ought to be the case. Not a single one of the upcoming topic choices for Jan/Feb '24, for example, expresses a vague philosophical generality[5] and so, whatever topic is chosen, any debater insisting on interpreting that resolution in such a way will be failing to affirm the topic, and I don’t think appealing to the sheer superiority of philosophical topics should be a defense in that case. Maybe generic generalizations make for worse debates, but if so, then one ought to submit and vote for alternatives and lobby for others to do the same, not retcon whichever topic wins into the style one would have preferred.
Personally, I have variously sharply criticized and advocated for topics of the vaguer style depending on context, but a more extended defense of the possibility of valuable general-principle topics seems beside the point if the question is what topics do in fact mean rather than what they ideally would say.
And this, I think, is the second main flaw of the linguistic defense of subset affirmatives. Their third premise is not a linguistic analysis of how debaters at national circuit tournaments (or anywhere else) actually speak, so much as a criticism of even caring about that question in the first place. If we do look at how such debaters talk in these high-level rounds, I don’t think there is any evidence that they are abiding by different grammatical norms from anyone else.
For one, it’s not even clear what alternative set of rules they are purported to be following. It always seems to end up at the conclusion that the affirmative can elect to defend a specific plan, but not at all for the same reasons, topic to topic. On some topics, it involves disregarding a qualifying adjective, such as “unconditional” in “Resolved: A just government ought to recognize an unconditional right of workers to strike” (Nov/Dec '21). On others, it means reinterpreting a verb like “banning” handguns (Jan/Feb '16) or “eliminating” fossil fuel subsidies (Nov/Dec '19) to instead mean something like “marginally reduce.” Some topics use indefinite singular noun phrases, such as “Resolved: In a democracy, a free press ought to prioritize objectivity over advocacy” (Mar/Apr '22), which of course morph into “There exists at least one democracy in which…”, and then the affirmative will select one.
The most common of all is the use of bare plural noun phrases to express a generalization, as in “Resolved: Adolescents ought to have the right to make autonomous medical choices” (Sep/Oct '15). The standard move is to swear up and down that one totally thinks this particular noun phrase is existentially rather than generically quantified, so that the resolution ends up saying something like “There exist at least two autonomous medical choices that at least two adolescents ought to have the right to make.” But then at other points, debaters will outright ignore the fact that the term is plural entirely, as when defending a singular state of their choice on any topic that references “states” as the agent of action. They’ll even regularly defend singular examples on topics where no quantification of the relevant bare plural noun could possibly allow for that conclusion, as with the military aid topic (Jan/Feb '19).
In a hypothetical dialect that permitted those readings, it’s hard to imagine how one would ever express a generalization. Of course, these debaters have no trouble expressing generalizations. They do so all the time, using the exact same grammar as the resolution, in the exact same rounds that they are arguing that the resolution doesn’t do so.
Returning to the examples from the beginning, let’s look at some sample plan texts presented by highly successful affirmative debaters on those topics:
Topic—Resolved: Justice requires open borders for human migration.
Plan—Resolved: Justice requires African open borders for human migration.
Topic—Resolved: States ought to ban lethal autonomous weapons.
Plan—Resolved: States ought to ban lethal autonomous nuclear weapons.
Anything seem amiss? Not to any negative debater I’ve ever judged. Having adjudicated many a round, I have yet to see a negative debater accidentally misinterpret the affirmative to mean they are only talking about two or more African borders, or only proposing to ban AI from at least two nuclear weapons. I’ve never even seen a debater feel the need to clarify the potential ambiguity in cross-examination.
You’d think they would, though, on the linguistic view at least. After all, the affirmative side has just demonstrated a propensity to interpret the terms in sentences with this exact structure and almost identical wording as being existentially quantified rather than generic. In many of these rounds, they will even go on to argue that bare plural noun phrases are ambiguous in response to topicality. And yet they’ll word their plan texts in precisely the same way, without a hint of irony, and expect the negative to interpret that sentence generically. And the negative does, without fail.
This behavior seems easy enough to explain given the classical defense of plans mentioned at the outset. These debaters know how generic generalizations work, they know most resolutions take that form, and they use those phrases just like everyone else. They just happen to think that the affirmative ought to be allowed to defend specific examples of the topic rather than “the topic” itself. And if they raise a grammatical defense of their practices in the rebuttals, it’s just additional sand thrown up as a distraction.
But if you take these plans to be evidence of how debaters sincerely interpret sentences like the resolution, and if you take their rebuttal arguments to be accurate descriptions of their true grammatical intuitions, then it should be awfully strange that their very own plan texts don’t adhere to those rules. Nor their counter-interpretations to topicality, which will generically reference “affs,” “plans,” “debaters,” and the like. Nor most of the sentences in any one of these speeches. Because the norms are so universal and deeply ingrained that even the debaters expressly denying them can’t help but abide by them.
In conclusion, I don’t think there is a distinct “national circuit” grammar in which singular instances really do affirm apparently generic propositions, and even there were, it would not be the relevant context for a descriptive analysis of the resolution.
[1] Jake Nebel. “Jake Nebel on Specifying ‘Just Governments’.” Victory Briefs. 19 December 2014. https://victorybriefs.substack.com/p/jake-nebel-on-specifying-just-governments
[2] Bob Overing. “Topicality and Plans in LD: A Reply to Nebel by Bob Overing.” Premier Debate. 11 December 2014. https://www.premierdebate.com/articles/topicality-and-plans-in-ld-a-reply-to-nebel-by-bob-overing/
[3] Iris Chen and Sam McLoughlin. “A Linguistic Defense of Subset Affirmatives in Circuit LD.” Victory Briefs. 20 September 2023. https://victorybriefs.substack.com/p/913-920-ld-tournament-results-and
[4] Jake Nebel. “Genericity on the Standardized Tests Resolution.” Victory Briefs. 12 August 2019. https://victorybriefs.substack.com/p/genericity-on-the-standardized-tests-resolution
[5] The first and the third topic options even offer quite broad leeway to the affirmative side in choice of mechanism: “Resolved: The United States federal government ought to substantially strengthen its obligation of trust responsibility toward Indigenous Nations,” “Resolved: The United States ought to recognize Iraqi Kurdistan,” and “Resolved: The United States ought to substantially reduce its military presence in the West Asia-North Africa region.”
[6] Lawrence Zhou, Jacob Nails, Amadea Datel, Eva Lamberson, and Charles Karcher. “November/December 2022 LD Topic Roundtable.” Victory Briefs. 23 September 2022. https://victorybriefs.substack.com/p/november-december-2022-ld-topic-roundtable
[7] Amadea Datel, Eva Lamberson, Jacob Nails, and Lawrence Zhou. “January/February 2023 LD Topic Roundtable.” Victory Briefs. 24 November 2022. https://victorybriefs.substack.com/p/january-february-2023-ld-topic-roundtable
[8] Jake Nebel. “Existential Bare Plurals and Quantifier Scope.” Victory Briefs. 2 January 2019. https://victorybriefs.substack.com/p/existential-bare-plurals-and-quantifier-scope-by-jake-nebel
Jacob Nails is Head Researcher at Victory Briefs. He debated 4 years for Starr’s Mill High School (GA) in Lincoln Douglas debate, graduating in 2012. As a competitor, he won the Georgia state tournament, cleared at NSDA nationals, and qualified to the TOC. In college, he qualified twice to the National Debate Tournament in policy debate. Jacob has 7 years of experience coaching LD debate, including coaching debaters to top seed at the TOC, as well as Top Speaker awards at Harvard, Yale, and Bronx. He has taught at over twenty sessions of the Victory Briefs Institute.