2/14-2/21: LD & PF Tournament Results and Common Mistakes in Traditional LD
Lincoln Douglas Debate
Tournament Results
This weekend, LD debaters competed at two bid tournaments: the Harvard National Speech and Debate Tournament and the Cal Invitational at UC Berkeley.
Congratulations to Prospect’s Sophia Tian for championing the 2024 Harvard National Speech and Debate Tournament. In finals, Sophia defeated Lake Highland Prep’s Harris Layson on a 3-0 decision (Beckett, Xie, Yosafat). Additional congratulations to Scripps Ranch’s Agastya Sridharan for being the top speaker.
Full pairings and results can be found here.
Congratulations to Harvard Westlake’s William Liu for championing the 2024 Cal Invitational at UC Berkeley. In finals, William defeated Harker’s Ansh Sheth on a 2-1 decision (Menotti, Urfalian, Reichel*). Additional congratulations to Oak Ridge Independent’s Arnav Arjula for being the top speaker.
Full pairings and results can be found here.
Public Forum Debate
Tournament Results
This weekend, PF debaters competed at two bid tournaments: the Harvard National Speech and Debate Tournament and the Cal Invitational at UC Berkeley.
Congratulations to Ezekiel Ehrenberg & Alex Calder from Delbarton for championing the 2024 Harvard National Speech and Debate Tournament. In finals, they defeated Josh Cohen & Henry Anastasi from JR Masterman on a 4-3 decision (Black*, Bovenzi*, Hone*, Agarwal, Jones, Liu, Paulson). Additional congratulations to Ridge’s Pranav Mahesh for being the top speaker.
Full pairings and results can be found here.
Congratulations to Ahmad Elassaad & Arnav Ratna from College Prep for championing the 2024 Cal Invitational at UC Berkeley. In finals, they defeated Vedesh Kodnani & Yuvraj Walia from Mission San Jose on a 3-0 decision (Moon, Rusk, Sen). Additional congratulations to Westridge’s Grace Wieland 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.
VBI 2024 Staff Announcement
We are so excited to start announcing our instructors for VBI 2024! Every week, you’ll get a chance to learn more about the talented staff working at VBI this summer. This week’s staff feature is LD instructor Adam Kesselman.
Adam Kesselman debated at Greenhill for 4 years. He made it to the semi-finals of the Tournament of Champions (TOC) as well as the elimination rounds of many national tournaments. He primarily read kritiks (Cap K, Psychoanalysis K, Humanism K, Anthropocene K, Whiteness K), policy arguments (Politics DA, Topic DAs, CPs), and started reading K Affs his senior year. He is very excited to share the things he has learned during high school debate. Looking forward to teaching this year at camp!
Common Mistakes in Traditional LD
by Lawrence Zhou
Introduction
Traditional LD has always held a special place in my heart (if I even have one) because it, at its best, can really help debaters discover the wonders of thinking philosophically about the world in a way that is accessible to the vast majority of audiences. It is through traditional LD debate that I first discovered the classic philosophical debate between consequentialism and deontology, which proved invaluable in sailing through my freshman philosophy classes.
However, that’s not to say that traditional LD is without its faults, and I think that there are a few common mistakes that crop up pretty often. In this essay, I’ll briefly cover three common mistakes that traditional LDers often make and how to avoid making them yourself.
Number 1: The Framework is NOT a Voting Issue
This is perhaps my biggest pet peeve in traditional LD, one that I’ve spent the better part of the last decade trying to dispel.
So many debaters often conclude their final rebuttal speeches by offering three voting issues. This is, in principle, a good idea—debaters should try to make the debate simple for their judges and try to summarize the debate into three discrete areas of clash.
The mistake arises when debaters, often reflexively and without good reason for understanding why they engage in this practice, label the criterion or framework clash a voting issue.
The reason why this is a mistake is perhaps too long to summarize in a single blog post, which is why fellow debate coach Nick Smith and I co-authored a course for the NSDA called “Intro to Framework” which I would wholeheartedly recommend to many beginning and JV LD debaters who are just getting into thinking about framework more systematically. While the course is a little long, I think it distills many of the common mistakes about framework down into a single, digestible course with many resources and examples that should help the average debater (or coach) substantially improve their understanding of framework in LD debate.
The short reason why this is a mistake is summarized in Part II of my series on the Wyoming Debate Roundup here. I will copy and paste the relevant sections below (but I think you should read the entire series if you’re still a bit confused as to why the criterion, by definition, cannot be a voting issue):
To illustrate the illogical nature of this statement, we begin by breaking down what a “voting issue” is. At its core, a voting issue is any argument a debater wants a judge to vote on. The concept of a voting issue has been expanded (almost certainly unconsciously) to include any argument that the debater wants the judge to remember clearly when making their decision. I find this expansion puzzling since the language of “voting issue” clearly implies that this argument is more than something that is important, but instead something worthy of a label that demands the judge consider it as a sufficient reason to vote for one side over another. There are already a myriad of ways to highlight the importance of arguments to a decision without considering them “voting issues.”
By definition, criterions cannot be voting issues. There are two ways to conceptualize why this is the case.
The first is just to think about the illogical nature of the statement. You don’t need a robust understanding of debate theory to figure out why the following argument is invalid.
Premise 1: All humans have inviolable dignity that stems from their rationality.
Premise 2: This suggests that Kant’s conception of morality is correct.
Conclusion: Therefore, the United States ought to guarantee universal childcare.
Clearly, there are several missing premises. Why does Kant’s moral theory being correct suggest anything about universal childcare? It doesn’t! It’d be equally as valid to argue the following:
Premise 1: All humans have inviolable dignity that stems from their rationality.
Premise 2: This suggests that Kant’s conception of morality is correct.
Conclusion: Therefore, the United States ought not guarantee universal childcare.
The above is just as valid. The fact that the same premises can justify totally contradictory conclusions suggests that there is something that has gone awry in the reasoning process.
Simply put, winning that a certain set of values ought to take precedence over another set of values does not itself have any bearing on the truth or falsity of the resolution. A voting issue has to relate to a reason why the topic itself is true or false. They must be contention arguments.
In summary, while the criterion/framework is important for framing what arguments matter more (e.g., if a debater wins that we ought to be utilitarians, then only arguments related to overall pleasure and pain will be relevant), it is not—alone—enough to constitute a reason to vote for one side or the other.
Number 2: The Framework is NOT (Always) Relevant
Again, I think that framework in LD is extremely fun to learn about and research, but that doesn’t imply that it will always be relevant in a debate. In fact, I argue that in many circumstances, the framework debate is generally irrelevant and should be abandoned in favor of discussing areas that actually clash with what the opponent says.
Recall what the purpose of a framework is (and, again, if you’re not entirely sure what it is, I would recommend taking the NSDA Framework course linked above). The point of a framework, strategically speaking, is to inflate the relevance of certain impacts, and to deflate the relevance of other impacts. A good framework should try to inflate the value of your impacts while simultaneously deflating the value of your opponent’s impacts.
For example, if you have a framework that is primarily consequentialist in nature—in other words, it primarily cares about consequences of our actions—while your opponent has a framework that is primarily deontological in nature—in other words, it cares a lot more about adhering to moral rules than the consequences of actions, then impacts about the consequences will matter far more than impacts about violating the rules of morality under your criterion.
However, in many circumstances, the framework debate becomes unnecessary because both debaters will aggressively agree about which impacts are the most important, they’ll merely disagree about which side is better able to uphold those impacts. As Wyoming debate coach Matt Liu points out:
A lot of the time, however, the V/C debate does not meaningfully distinguish the impacts in the debate. There may very well be meaningful differences between utilitarianism and societal welfare, between prioritizing human life and pragmatism, between human welfare and the social contract; however, the differences between those six concepts do not explain a meaningful reason to prioritize the environment over the economy (or vice versa), which is the core controversy of the current topic. Both the environment and the state of the economy implicate societal welfare, a pragmatist would want to care about both of those things, human lives are affected by both, etc. The most common V/C do not meaningfully contrast environmental and economic impacts, which means they are not functioning as useful weighing standards, impact calc, or frameworks for evaluating most rounds on this topic. In these instances, the time spent on the V/C debate is not achieving a win condition: debaters are spinning their wheels but the time spent on the V/C is not meaningfully shaping the outcome of the round.
In particular, I think of so many debaters where the affirmative says that their criterion primarily cares about particular types of consequences, the negative says that their criterion primarily cares about a different set of consequences, and then both sides appeal to the exact same set of consequences in their contentions, rendering the whole point of the framework debate moot. This is basically a waste of rebuttal speech time and debaters would be better served jettisoning the framework debate in favor of actual arguments that clash with what the opponent says.
You should offer a full-throated defense of your criterion or framework whenever it’s relevant, i.e., whenever the impacts in your contentions are fundamentally different from the ones that your opponents have. But in so many debates, the framework debate is ultimately irrelevant because both sides appeal to what are basically the same impacts (or impacts so similar that they are a distinction without a difference).
Number 3: The Introduction Should Be Shorter
While not nearly as important an issue as the above two issues, this is still a mistake I frequently encounter while judging rounds. I often hear cases from debaters where the entire first minute of the case is more or less irrelevant to the arguments presented in the case. Given that the AC is only 6 minutes long (nearly half of all the speech time that the affirmative gets for the entire debate round), I would be more hesitant to squander such limited, and hence precious speech time, on things that do not enhance the overall chances of winning the debate.
Here are a few places where I think that debaters often waste time when writing out the introductions to their case.
Opening quotes. I used to wholeheartedly recommend reading an opening quote in your case. While I still think that this can be a good idea in front of certain judges, I often now advise students to have a short, catchy intro to their case instead of wasting a whole 20 seconds reading a quote by someone that the judge probably doesn’t know. Now, instead of reading the whole quote by Ben Franklin, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety,” I might recommend that debaters instead simply say, “Because those who give up liberty for safety deserve neither, I affirm.”
Reading the resolution. I used to also suggest that debaters read the resolution aloud in its entirety in every affirmative case. I no longer do so. Unless this is your judge’s first round on the topic, they will have heard the resolution before and so there is no need to waste 15-20 seconds reading the resolution aloud again. And the negative definitely does not need to reread the entire resolution aloud after the judge has heard it mere minutes before. You can simply state that you affirm or negate and then get into the actual substance of your case.
Definitions. Some topics will require that the affirmative define terms in the introduction, but there are definitely lots of cases that still waste time reading definitions when they don’t matter. I see this when affirmative cases will define every word in the resolution, including the ones that are obvious. I see this when the negative reads definitions that the affirmative has already read aloud in the AC and when these definitions don’t disagree with what the affirmative has said. There are some times when definitions matter, e.g., when the topic is a bit confusing for judges, when you are relying on specific definitions to make your arguments relevant, or when you are the negative and want to challenge a definition offered by the affirmative. However, the vast majority of the time, reading these definitions does not matter and debaters would be better advised to simply get to the actual arguments on the topic.
“Definitions are available upon request.” For some reason, I still hear this phrase quite often. I cannot understand why debaters say this. If you have a definition that you want the judge to know about, you have to say it aloud in your speech; if you don’t have an important definition that you want the judge to know about, then don’t bother wasting your breath saying this sentence. Why would either your judge or opponent request your definitions?
Unnecessary previews/roadmaps. While the triptych of “tell ‘em what you’re gonna tell ‘em, then tell ‘em, then tell ‘em what you just told ‘em” is a good one generally, it is not as applicable to most debate rounds. Too often, I hear debaters preview their contentions in their introduction by saying something like, “I will show in my following three contentions—contention 1 about human rights, contention 2 about US credibility, and contention 3 about safeguarding minoritarian interests—why you should affirm the resolution. Contention 1 is human rights…” This is simply too long. It very rarely helps the judge organize their flow any better, but it does often take quite a long time to say. Instead, you should just omit the unnecessary preview and instead seamlessly transition from the introduction to the actual content of your case.
Now, that is not to say there is not some benefit to repeating your arguments more than once. In psychology, we know that the mere exposure effect is powerful, which is simply that people tend to show an increased preference to stimuli that they are exposed to repeatedly. This partly explains why it is a good idea to repeat the key ideas in your speech more than once. However, this is already captured in a debate round because the judge should hear your arguments more than once—they will, after all, listen to multiple speeches. You should focus on repeating your core arguments once (maybe twice) in each speech instead of trying to say the same thing over and over and over again.
Lawrence Zhou is the former Director of Lincoln‐Douglas Debate and Director of Publishing at Victory Briefs. He debated at Bartlesville HS where he was the 2014 NSDA Lincoln‐Douglas national champion. He is formerly a Fulbright Taiwan Debate Trainer, the Debate League Director at the National High School Debate League of China, a graduate assistant at the University of Wyoming, head coach of Team Wyoming, a CEDA octofinalist and Ethics Bowl finalist while debating at the University of Oklahoma, and an assistant coach at Apple Valley High School and The Harker School. His students have advanced to late outrounds at numerous regional and national invitational tournaments, including finals appearances at the NSDA National Tournament and semifinals appearances at the Tournament of Champions.