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Re: The Judges Will Have a Lot of Explaining to Do! (fwd)

I am not trying to defend "threatening" judges by telling them that they 
will have a lot of explaining to do, but I do see some point to such 
statements.  In one of our prelim debates at the NDT this year, a team 
ran a disad they had not run at previous tournaments.  We received some 
scattershot info about this argument before the debate, but not enough to 
make much sense of it.  The team ran this argument, and being the only 
disad in the debate, my partner and I devoted a lot of attention to it - 
both cross examinations and plenty of prep time.  We read through all 
their cards, and even asked them about it privately during prep, and we 
still couldn't make heads or tails of it.  We did not know how it linked, 
or even if it did, why that meant we lost.  In both the 2AC and the 1AR I 
made note of the lack of a coherent explanation.  As of the 2AR, we still 
had little clue.  In exasperation, at the end of the 2AR, my partner said 
something along the lines of "Look, this argument has yet to make any 
sense to either of us, so if you vote on it, you are going to have to 
explain to us why it applies."  We did not really consider this a "we're 
losing so we better threaten the judges" tactic.  We considered it an 
appeal to common sense.  If you can explain it based on what they said 
during the debate, then by all means vote on it.  But, if their 
explanation makes as little sense to you as it does to us, then vote 
aff.  We just thought it might make the judges think twice about it 
because the issue was so unclear throughout the debate.  I obviously was 
not in attendance for the speech everyone is writing about, but I do 
think such statements can sometimes help to bring the judges' focus back 
to the explanations given in the debate, as opposed to just deciding 
there was less ink from one side on the line-by-line.  Maybe we were 
losing the line-by-line - we never knew because no one (including the 3 
judges) could explain the position in the first place. *shrug*

-adrienne
Wake Forest
References:
Archive created by Jonathan Stanton (jonathan@cs.jhu.edu)
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