Quality Over Quantity

This weekend, I was helping run a college ADPA tournament hosted by Swarthmore. Unlike some previous APDA tournaments this year that I was tabbing, I ended up judging a few rounds and was extraordinarily impressed by the quality of rounds that I witnessed. The rounds were interesting, they touched on questions of poetry, religion, and translation and featured debaters who were focused more on learning and discussing than competitive success.

When thinking of what to write for this week, I knew I wanted to explain some of my thoughts as to why the rounds I watched this weekend were excellent, but was missing the theme for a prospective post. Sophie Rukin was able to help — and within a litany of potential topics for this post was the phrase “quality over quantity.” This is part of the reason why the rounds this weekend were excellent: the debaters emphasized making true and strong arguments over flooding the flow with blippy responses.

First, some context. Commonly in high school rounds, speakers who are more successful will do say things like “this is wrong for six reasons” and then go on to enumerate the six. I would even suppose that if one were to poll debaters and ask whether over the course of one minute of speaking time they found it more impressive to make one argument or six, I suspect the vast majority would answer six. The majority is wrong.

My aim over the next few hundred words is to encourage you to make fewer, truer, better explained arguments in round. Instead of throwing warrants at you for why you ought do this, I shall instead make my case as most reasonable people do, by explaining one, hopefully well explained, quality argument.

I urge everyone to examine RFDs they found impressive and thorough. I suspect those RFDs did not take the form of “the government had six arguments, three were rebutted, and thus three are correct as opposed to the opposition’s two" but rather “the most important issue in the round is x, as told to me by the PMR, and government wins that issue for this reason.” If given the option between voting on a one-line blipped argument and a well flushed out true argument, I would suppose that every judge worth their salt would vote on the latter.

Hopefully that is enough for you to consider quality to be descriptively preferred — if you don’t see why, post a comment and let me know why! The more interesting discussion, though, is on the level of why this is how the world ought be.

If you consider the aim of debate to be to explore schools of thought and to learn, then it must follow that arguments should be quality as opposed to numerous — surely it is easier to understand and learn from a genuine well-explained argument than a two or three sentence piece of debate jargon.

I suspect, though, that those of you thinking the quantitative approach is preferred fall into two camps, the: (a) throw shit at wall camp and the (b) hedge your bets camp. These two camps aren’t that far apart. Those in group (a) likely believe that my throwing up six responses to an argument, or seven warrants why something is correct, means that even if the judge doesn’t buy three or four, they still have enough material to win under and those in group (b) likely believe that regardless of the judge’s propensity to buy any of their six arguments, they are heding against what their opponents might say or their own inability to fully flow and respond to arguments prior in the round.

Both of these camps are missing the boat.

One well explained and true argument, carefully selected with thought about where the round is likely to go, withstands much response. Not only does it withstand response, it is likely to implant itself in the judge’s head, and force future arguments to be compared to it. Consider for example a length characterization argument, any future characterization in the round must beat that first characterization in order to have any weight. Judges are often charitable to good debaters who throw up a lot of poorly explained arguments and perform cross applications for the debaters — judges should stop, and force the debaters to choose an advocacy, and apply their advocacy to every place it needs to apply.

Debate is also more fun when you compete in this matter — you learn more, your brain explores the nooks and crannies of certain thoughts, and has time to fully understand what is going one.

Oh, and you’ll win more rounds. Try it and trust me.

There’s more to say on this topic, and I suspect it will occupy many future posts, but I hope that this makes my position clear, and has convinced you all to try something new.