evidence and flowing

[Brian R McGee <bmcgee@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu>]

I offer two thoughts on the related evidence and flowing threads prior to
grading forty rather lengthy student essays:

1. I do my best to flow tags, cites and evidence content when judging.  I
sometimes fail to get cites or evidence content when the round is fast and/or
the evidence is only one or two sentences long.  I make the effort because it
helps me to recall evidence content and assists in sorting out what evidence
has been read and what evidence has not been used in those unpleasant rounds
when I have to read several cards.  I can recall over a dozen cases in my
six-plus years of judging when I was offered a card that hadn't been read in
the debate.  

I assume that every debater understands that an assumed risk comes with rapid
delivery.  The more rapid the delivery, the more likely it is that I will
miss something, especially if the debater slurs her/his words.  

2. I respectfully disagree with Professor Hunt's assertion that the quality
of evidence in CEDA has declined in recent years.  Despite the recent concern

about LEXIS and other electronic evidence sources, there don't seem to be
many LEXIS-only squads out there.  A year ago, I threw away some blocks from
the mid- and late-1980s that had been acquired via transfer or trade from a
dozen different good NDT and CEDA programs.  I was startled by the poor
quality of these blocks in comparison with much of what I now see at CEDA
tournaments.  Granted, some current research is garbage and some of those old
blocks were exemplary, but I see no evidence that the general increase in
expectations about quantity of research is necessarily linked to a decline in
evidence quantity.  The trend towards longer cards containing more analysis
seems to have helped improve evidence quality overall since 1990.  Please
recognize that my impressions are necessarily anecdotal and do not
account for trends in regions of the country where I do not regularly judge.

I will make one admission that may startle some of you: When I debated at
Southern Illinois from 1986-1989, we had NO ACCESS to a departmental or
college photocopier.  If we wanted to photocopy anything, we paid for it
ourselves.  Consequently, the vast majority of our evidence was typed by
the debaters and reproduced using a ditto-machine.  In my own experience,
the typing requirement functioned as a kind of quality control, since we
had another opportunity to check the relationship between tag and
evidence; often, we threw out evidence at this stage because its
sub-standard quality didn't merit the typing effort.  Obviously, the
declining cost of photocopying has all but eliminated the
quality-control advantage that came with typing evidence.  (Not
surprisingly, those of us who had to complete the typing job didn't find
the quality-control argument particularly compelling.)


Brian McGee
Ohio State

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