A debate mom emailed us this week…
“In a recent meet, the 1NR only used one piece of evidence, and then told me what the voters were, recapping the round. It sounded like a 2NR to me. I felt like I heard two 2NRs. Shouldn’t the 1NR be still building arguments, or reconstructing the ones attacked by the 2AC? I thought a rebuttal was rebuilding what has been attacked. I know the 2NR should be clear on the voters, but I think the 1NR still has more work to do. What are your thoughts?”
Answer:
Isaiah: We’ve experimented a lot with what to do when in rebuttals this semester while debating at PHC. Yellis and I tried voters in the 1NR and 1AR several times. Our conclusion was that it is advantageous to the affirmative for a flow to be very narrow and voters all the way up in the 1AR really help to put things back on affirmative ground and scale down negative arguments. However, we found that voters in the 1NR basically did the affirmative’s tough job in the 1AR for them. By boiling down ALL negative argumentation, 1NR voters basically eliminate the advantage of the negative block and give the 1AR a very easy group of arguments to respond to. Thus, the 1NR should be focused on still keeping negative argumentation as broad as possible.
Mrs. A: I would much rather hear a 1NR rebut the 2AC and thus, not drop any of the arguments made by the affirmative. I like a 2NC to really hit the affirmative case with DAs and really be on the offensive and set up the final arguments. The 1NR is the one who has to finish up with the 2AC arguments and extend the 1NC arguments. The 2NC would then recap the major negative positions (hopefully the winning ones), extend with evidence if necessary, and give voters. Why have two rebuttals if they are both exactly the same? That is just bad strategy plus it sounds rushed, looks like the negative has nothing further to say, and gives a bad impression to the judge.
Conclusion: When negative, use the 1NR to rebuild the arguments made in the 1NC and refute the 2AC. Use the 2NR to boil down the argumentation. When affirmative, try to bring the round down to the voters as soon as possible in order to keep the negative team on the defensive.
In my experience, the most effective use of the 2NC/1NR was to divide up the issues begun in the 1NC and go in-depth. Suppose I’d argued in the 1NC that the plan would result in a savage Loch Ness Monster attack. The 2AC responds:
1. That’s ridiculous: There’s no such thing as the Loch Ness Monster.
2. Turn: The Loch Ness Monster would love our plan.
3. No Impact: Nessie couldn’t get out of Loch Ness, so at the worst, all she could do is chomp on some Scottish tree branches.
The negative’s most powerful strategic advantage is to explain, in depth, with quality evidence that has well-developed reasons, why each of these three answers is not sufficient. The negative is not, at this point, under time pressure. The 2NC might want to take 1 and 2, and leave #3 for the 1NR to answer. The 2NC might thus load up on all the evidence that Nessie does exist, and explain in rich detail, using images and analogies and every other element of quality argumentation, that Nessie would be enraged by the plan. That would leave the 1NR free to explain, in technicolor detail, just how devastating a Loch Ness Monster attack would be to the entire planet. (Didn’t know she had feet, did you?)
During all that development, it’s certainly worthwhile for the negative to put the various arguments in the debate in perspective, to do a lot of “Even if” debating, as in “Even if we don’t win argument X, or even if they’re right about argument Y, we still win because of Z,” but that kind of pulling together shouldn’t eat up too terribly much time.
As far as the 1AR, most of my colleagues in debating and coaching thought the job of the 1AR was to keep the 2AR’s options open, by keeping alive a diverse set of arguments from the 2AC, and making a diverse set of arguments against anything new in the 2NR. That meant the 2AR could survey the strategic landscape and choose this or that option after they’d seen what the 2NR executed. I differed a little: I believed in having the 1AR make some definite strategic moves and actually close off options, to “play the hand,” so that in the 2AR all I had to do was explain what happened. A lot of times, judges would sympathize with negative teams if they thought what the 2AR did wasn’t predictable from the 1AR, but the way we did it, they almost never had that complaint.