New Years Debate Resolutions 1: Evidence Quality

Ask any old person (over 25) and they will be happy to tell you about how debate evidence quality was much higher in their time. They aren’t wrong. Now, obviously I am not saying “every card ever read in 1965 is better than any card read in 2019”. I am saying that on average the quality of a piece of evidence 20 years ago was higher. Why? Is it just because the children are terrible? Not entirely

 

1. Evidence is much easier to have now- when I debated if Northwestern read a good card and I wanted to get it I had to go to the library, find the book in the stacks, photocopy it, OCR it… it was exhausting. Now most evidence is open source. This in and of itself is not a problem but when combined with debaters obsession with having “all the cards!” it can be. Having 80 no root cause cards is not necessary, you need 1 or 2 good ones. But with the easy availability of wiki evidence debaters are incentivized to try and catch them all
2. Internet/sources- there are more people writing evidence now, in more places. Many of them have very low barriers to entry- like medium. This means its basically possible for anyone anywhere to write something, put it on the internet, and have it turned into a card. While the newspapers of old weren’t perfect (Sacramento Bee) they generally consisted of professional writers who had their articles edited.
3. Number of arguments- the sheer number of things you can have to debate at a tournament now is much bigger. Not only the more widespread use of the K, but even in just policy terms teams rarely read the big/heart of the topic cases anymore. This means you have to prepare for hundreds of things and as a result your prep on any 1 specific thing ends up being worse.
4. Beliefs about judges- ask most debaters now and they will tell you “judges don’t care about evidence quality”. They aren’t wrong- many judges do not.
5. Poorly worded topics- this could either be the words themselves don’t produce core aff/neg ground/strategies (like China being backwards) or because as written there are few acceptable arguments (most immigration bad arguments).

 

So, as you can see there are a lot of factors going into the decline in evidence quality. Many of the above are outside of your control, some of the others are in your control and so its those that I’m going to focus on. For this first post I will divide evidence quality issues into two broad categories

-sources

-arguments

 

Let’s tackle sources first. Here are 3 ways to improve your evidence quality relating to sources

Fix your citations- most people put no time/thought into their cites-why should you?

1. Judges care- even if they dont say “i evaluated quals” its undeniable then when judges look at one piece of evidence with many listed and relevant qualifications and another with zero- it effects their decision.

2. Self Check- sometimes I will cut a card that seems questionable source wise. If I didn’t care about citations I would just slap anything on there and move on. Forcing yourself to look up the quals/publication not only gives you a minute to pause/reflect, it can also save you a lot of anguish later if it turns out your author is problematic.

3. Good Debate Citizenship- citations should include all the information needed for someone else to easily/reasonably find your evidence either to duplicate it or work on answers. Poor citations are just a joker move-either you have something to hide or you don’t care that you are making life harder for potentially many other people.

 

So what does a citation look like?

 

Last Name, Qualifications, Date

(First name, publication info, page)

 

Name- should be self explanatory but apparently its not. If an author is listed, you should use their name unless they are a “staff writer”. There are some publications (the economist) who rarely if ever publish author names. Then there are papers that publish author names but the author has no field qualifications, they are just a staff writer who was given that assignment. This is different from if the article is about the president and the author is the “white house correspondent”- that is not a “staff” position. SO- if the author is listed, and they aren’t a staff writer, use the author name. Why would people not want to use the name? Usually because there is something problematic about the author. If a journal article lists multiple authors you can use “et al.” when there are 3 or more. If you use it, you list the name that FIRST appears in the article. Things that are not ok: picking a person at random, picking the most qualified sounding person, not picking the first person because they are problematic.  Don’t use organization or website names in place of names either.

Look up that persons qualifications- this isn’t hard, many articles have it right there for you. If its not there use google. Sometimes there are many people named X so you have to click through some results (the horror!) but it never takes more than a few seconds. On the top line you should list either their terminal degree or their most relevant field qualification. So if you are debating US presence in South Korea, and someone is a PhD in IR-go with that. If they have a bunch of quals, one of which is Chair of Asian Security department@think tank- you can use that. It should be short, you can read more if a debate emerges- but you should be reading enough so that you can distinguish your ev from the other teams

 

Date- year is fine. If its uniqueness or something else time sensitive you can list the date like 1-11-19. DO NOT just put the days “1-11”- there is NO reason to do this, and it creates all kinds of problems later when people don’t know the date of the card. Take the extra .3 micro seconds and put the year

 

Publication Info- this is a big one that people screw up, so lets look in a little more depth

 

A Book

The name should be in there- the full name, if a book is titled like “Nuclear war: perspectives from the subaltern” and you just put “nuclear war” that isn’t super helpful. If the book is NOT written by a single author, but is an edited volume than you need to make sure

-who wrote the part you are cutting

-list them as the author, but after the book list the names of the editor- the author won’t turn the book up on Amazon etc. because they only list editors

-include the chapter title-like page this isn’t necessary if everyone has electronic copies, but not everyone has equal access to that so give them all the information you can

 

A journal

For a journal article you should make it like this

Last Name, Quals, Date

(First Name, Title of the Journal Article Name of the Journal, Volume/Number)

 

The title of the article can be helpful in finding it, so that’s obvious, ditto the name of the journal. The volume/number is something people leave out a lot… don’t do that. A lot of journal databases like Ebsco have AWFUL search functions, sometimes only searching in that specific journal for the name of the article will turn up no results. Then you have to navigate to it through the archive. Many journal databases now include a cover page with this info there for you to copy and paste- JUST DO IT.

 

DO NOT PUT THE $&$&*#*@&$& DATABASE URL!!!! Databases are places where you search for journals like

-jstor

-tandfonline

-wiley

-sage

etc.

 

These links are not “stable”. google.com is a stable link- anyone can type it in and go. The URL created for you from a database is just for you- you can often see in the URL like “proxy.emory.edu” -this means if you click the link it won’t work for you. So if all you include is that URL your being a joker. I have even seen now people posting the “URL” from chrome and it will look like

file:///C:/Users/sphillips/OneDrive%20-%20Harvard-Westlake%20School/Desktop/R43960.pdf

 

This is not a website- this is a location of that PDF on your computer- no one else can use that.

 

Other websites

MAKE SURE YOU GET THE CORRECT URL. This is simple- click in the box, hit ctrl-A, ctrl-c. Many people clip of the end, include the google search result link rather than the article link, or just say “web” or “google”. This one couldn’t be easier and there isn’t really an excuse for messing it up.

 

 

 

Now, onto types of evidence. I want to talk about 5 kinds of cards people cut that they should stop

 

1. Lit review- these are tempting, often there is lots of good sounding sentences right next to each other! The problem is that the author is summarizing the views of others, not making arguments themselves, so this imo is indistinguishable from a straw argument. If your card has 30 citations in it, odds are high it came from a lit review section. But beyond the ethics- these cards usually sound good but are actually bad- they rarely explain anything in depth/provide any warrant. Look at the people being cited/go cut them for the good cards
2. Normative vs Descriptive errors- Normative claims are claims about how the world SHOULD be, descriptive claims are claims about how the world IS. Outside it’s raining- descriptive. It shouldn’t be raining in southern California- normative. In debate sometimes you want one, sometimes you want the other. Uniqueness- that’s a statement about how the world is, and that calls for a descriptive card. “x WILL pass” is much , much better than “x should pass” for a politics uniqueness card. “x and y are in peace talks” vs “x and y should be in peace talks” etc. For solvency/disad links generally you can find cards that are either normative or descriptive, and you will need to decide what you want. If you are making an advantage claim like “X hurts Y” you probably want a descriptive solvency argument because you are talking about something material. If you are saying “the plan restores US credibility” that’s more intangible and cards are going to trend to be more normative- “the plan should restore US credibility”. Be aware of the difference and think about which you should be looking for
3. Cards that are too short-   a card needs a claim and a warrant. “economic decline causes war”- that’s a claim. The sentence “if the global economy stagnates the US will face a new period of international conflict” has more words, bt its still a claim.  A warrant needs to answer “why” economic decline will cause war. If you cut your card off before it says why, it lacks a warrant and is a bad card. This is something that always puzzles me about marked cards- students in round act like evidence is life or death- WE MUST PAUSE THE ROUND FOR 45 MINUTES TO GET A MARKED COPY OF THE EVIDENCE WE WILL NEVER DISCUSS AGAIN!!!! But here is the thing- if you highlighted your evidence correctly you should be reading ONLY the bare minimum amount of words needed to make a complete argument. If you are then marking the card you must be leaving something important out. If you are constantly marking cards in your speech that isn’t a sign you are making amazing time allocation decisions on the fly- it means you are doing it, or your prep, randomly
4. Cards that are too long- I have this problem a lot. First of all- no one can read that. So they end up highlighting it down to nothing or marking it before the good parts. Why do people cut long cards? Sometimes they think “oh man we gotta read all 6 reasons for this”. Other times they “think” it should be long (k cards). Sometimes people are either too lazy or too unsure of how to break up something into multiple cards so they just throw it all together as one. Think for each card “how is this going to be used in a debate?” – if the card is a 2AC card to answer 1 off, then long it up. If its a 1AR card to answer a specific turns case arg on a disad – that needs to be short.
5. Cards that are CLOSE to what you want, but don’t really say it- this I see a ton. People will often defend it by saying “gotta read something”. No, no you don’t. Rather than read a bad card to answer the Micronesia prolif disad, make some smart analytics- how good could their ev possibly be? Just because the other team is reading bad cards doesn’t mean you need to match them (We cannot allow a bad card gap!)