ONLY 5 CARDS!!!

[Dallas Perkins]

Well, "Only 5 Cards" goes too far for me, but I do want to second what
Corey says.  No surprise there, I suppose.  Scott Hessell says that Corey
"panders to your (my) inadequacies as a judge."  That means that he, and
his partner, read evidence so that I can understand it, and then make
arguments with clear warrants at a pace that can be understood.

Here's the ultimate:  I judged a round at Cap City where there was a huge
dispute in CX about whether a card was read or not.  One team grabbed a
brief with two cards on it right after it was read (the only way to
possibly figure out what the card said without waiting until the end of
the speech.)  Answers were made in the next speech.  In the CX after that,
the first team claimed that the answered card had never been read.  The
other team said that it had.  Both sides seemed pretty certain.  Same
cite, hard to know for sure.  At least if you can't hear what's going on.

Lately I've pretty much given up insisting that ev be fully
comprehensible.  I just do whta everybody else does, and read it later if
it seems impertant enough.  That seems to be what the debaters want, and
they seem to get really upset if they are not allowed to go as fast as
they possibly can, whether comprehensible or not.  My only recourse these
days is to speaker points--teams that are partivularly hard to understand,
some of them really quite excellent in rebuttals, get 27.5, while lesser
teams with much poorer rebuttal skills get 28s.  This is silly, a travesty
really, since what I appreciate most about the debates is the great
rebuttal skills of the finest practitioners, even if I have trouble
understanding their constructives.  But, it seems the only recourse,
unless one is to utterly give up on comprehensibility.

I don't think debaters are ever going to solve this problem:  the
competitive advantage in reading one more card seems too great.  I have
tried to convince my debaters that comprehensible evidence makes their
constructive speeches more effective, but they know that most judges are
going to read the cards after the round and reconstruct their arguments,
maybe even more persuasively than the debaters made them in the first
place.  Plus, and this is really insidious, if the other team can not
understand the cards, it is much harder for them to attack them:  "Weak
link cards?  No problem, just read two or three of them, and read them
FAST."

The only hope if for judges to insist that the ev be comprehensible.  But
that takes admitting that they can't understand them now, and many judges
are loathe to do so, fearing, I suppose, that they will be thought
inferior judges.  There seems to be this sort of silent conspiracy to
pretend that everybody really knows whats going on in these fast
constructive speeches.  In fact, some people have better listening skills
than others, in fact, maybe better ears, and different people hear
different little snippets of the cards, and everybody has a vague idea of
what is going on, and we call it good enough.  A few judges who insist on
better get struck, allowing the conspirators to dominate the game.

I'm not urging slow debates.  I like rapid communication of info and
ideas.  And I think Korcok is right:  fast talking and listening makes us
smarter.  Our note taking skills dwarf those of mere mortals, in large
part because we are trained in this peculiar environment.  I love fast
debates.

But, I do think it would be better if judges insisted that they be able to
understand the evidence, and if debaters would respect that.

We talk a lot about decreased participation, not enough novices, too many
drop outs from high school.  People suggest all sorts of reasons:  the
work is hard, the days are long, the travel is expensive, resources are
unfairly allocated, and on and on.  But consider this little thought
experiment:  Suppose we took 100 strangers to debate to a college round at
a top tournament, and let them listen to the first three constructive
speeches of a round, then ask them if they would like to play.  My guess
is that EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM would say the same thing:  "No thanks, I
can't even understand what they are talking about!"

dp