Weighing: A Refresher

When Public Forum Debate was originally created, it was distinguished as an event that was meant to be accessible for the common man. It was designed so that if a person were to be pulled off of the street, they could easily adjudicate a round as the debaters were supposed to be effective at using their skills of persuasion through pathos, ethos and logos to convince the person of any cause. Making a person care about a given set of issues is often overlooked as one of the most important debate skills to acquire, which is why Public Forum, as designed, is difficult and requires practice. Debaters need to weigh all arguments made in the round in order to be effective in the debate. Debaters weigh their decisions all the time outside of rounds. They decide what suit combination they should wear for a certain tournament and even whether or not it's a good idea to print out that 500 page study that contains their largest impact. However, as a recent trend in Public Forum, weighing has taken a backseat to other debate strategies. Ranking higher are tasks such as finding evidence with the highest empirical impacts and constructing nonconventional contentions with semi-tangible links. Since I have begun evaluating rounds myself, I have found that there needs to be a much larger emphasis on how the debaters show how I should evaluate the round early on. In my paradigm, I propose to debaters one idea: if both teams have independent contentions indicating that their side has won the round, there is no way for me to choose who wins the round without judge intervention. It is of upmost importance that judges remain impartial arbitrators in rounds to promote fairness for the whole event but we, as judges, cannot do this if debaters do not provide a means of arbitration. Many Public Forum topics could be considered controversial and personal, so assisting your judge in remaining objective is necessary to maintaining actual neutrality. There are many techniques for weighing in rounds. Some are specific to Public Forum debate while others are borrowed from other events. However, it is important to identify and understand these methods before properly using and refuting them in rounds. The first technique is comparative analysis. This technique is often considered the most effortless way of weighing in round. To maximize any debater's ability to weigh, they need to create actual offense, reasons why they are winning, rather than simply providing reasons why their opponents are not winning. Defensive arguments are useful to countering complex constructives but they rarely are the reason why a judge decides to vote for you. Instead, by creating arguments that generate offense in case, debaters will be put in a better position before their opponents even give a rebuttal. Once rebuttals do take place, a debater is then able to say something along the lines of 'You should weigh this argument more heavily because…' There are a plethora of reasons for a judge to evaluate an argument as being more important than another but they cannot (or should not) evaluate this themselves without your guidance. It is the debater's responsibility to explain the 'why' not just the 'what.' Anything can answer the question of 'why,' the scope of the impact, its severity, its length, or even whether or not the impact is reversible, but none of this exists in round unless you make it exist. If you focus on weighing, you'll realize that any debater can outweigh seemingly indestructible pieces of evidence through explanation, not empirics (though empirics certainly help). For example, when debaters have intricate trillion dollar impacts, it can be intimidating to refute without knowing the study's methodology. Instead of just trying to find a number that is greater than the opponent's or repeatedly clashing over statistics, a debater can instead explain the logic as to why the gargantuan impact is not actually linked to the resolution. Extreme impacts rarely actually apply to Public Forum resolutions; if they did, the resolution would likely not exist because it would either be empirically true or false. The Final Focus does not exist so that you can just restate your arguments. Debaters need to use this speech to elucidate the weighing mechanism of the round and only then talk about their contentions in the context of how they fall into the calculus. The second tool, which was underutilized in Public Forum until recently, is the framework debate. Although Public Forum was not originally intended to include frameworks, the increasing complexity of the resolutions now requires that debaters create a custom outline of how the debate should function. For example, in the January resolution, Resolved: Development assistance should be prioritized over military in the Sahel region of Africa, there were certain frameworks that gave debaters an advantage from the beginning of the round. One framework that I heard stated that the policy that focused on solving problems in the long term instead of just mitigating issues as they occurred should be preferred. This worked for the affirmative side of the debate because it put priority on things such as teaching farming techniques and building infrastructure as being more important than shortsighted military assistance. For the negative, training the police and military force to maintain rule of law and promote stability to facilitate long-term growth gave debaters immense offense. If debaters are able to reaffirm the framework with additional analysis in every speech, by the time the second speaker gives their Final Focus, the weighing should be easy as you are just using the vessel of your framework to clarify how the arguments clash in the round. Overall, it is important that current and future debaters remember the most important tenets of not only Public Forum debate but also discourse in general. Articulately discussing why your impacts matter more or happen sooner is what distinguishes the good public speakers from the great. It ensures that an individual can win debate rounds but also exercise weighing as a valuable skill in both academic and professional spheres.