Tags

I’m willing to bet anything that you’re not tagging your cases as well as you could.

People often seem to forget that somewhere in the back of the room someone is trying to follow all the arguments, probably writing them down on paper. And all of the arguments are, as a general rule, complicated. Once you start throwing around evidence, and perhaps picking up your speaking pace to get through everything, you’re really burdening that poor note-taker back there. Oh, yeah, said note-taker loves speed and is proud of being the first in his or her region of the country to speak so fast back in the day that any room in which the debate was taking place was known to travel forward in time and leave everyone in the tri-state area dazzled by its Doppler effect. But still, as a debater, you can make it easy for our note-taker, or not. The choice is yours.

To make things easy, first of all, the entire contention needs to be cogently tagged. I’m not necessarily arguing against word economy, but at the top of your argument you should explain very clearly what the argument is about. This is analogous to what teachers tell you to do in writing an essay; you start off with a summary of your thesis. (Although, actually, both in speaking and writing you literally might start off with a teaser and then go into thesis summary, but we’ll presume that approach for this discussion.) This paragraph is, in fact, written in that style. Note the first sentence. It tells you that my subject is the need to tag contentions in a certain way. There is no doubt what I am talking about, although you don’t yet know what I am going to say about the subject. That will come in the ensuing sentences. If you were flowing this paragraph, the first thing you would write down is “entire contention needs to be cogently tagged.” If I were reading this aloud to you, I would slow down at that top sentence so that the thesis sinks in. Listen to a policy round some day. It’s not all blazing speed. They slow down when they need you to actually hear something, like the substance of their arguments. Speed is expended on reading the evidence and getting it into the record, so to speak.

What doesn’t work as a tag are things like, “Contention one, cogency,” any more than it would have worked if my first sentence in the paragraph above had been, “First, cogency.” Yeah, the idea is the same thing, but the clarity is missing. I’d have to sooner or later explain what I’m talking about before getting around to arguing for or against it. That’s a bad place to be in when you’re a debater. We should know exactly what you’re talking about at all times. A clearly tagged contention or subpoint will do that. An elliptical (or total lack of) tag will not. Which do you prefer?

Evidence, too, needs to be tagged. There are many ways to do this, but in LD this is usually handled in a statement such as, “The ICC is full of poopyheads. International analyst Joe McDoakes concurs: ‘The ICC comprises seventy-five percent off all poopyheads.” Your words lead us into the exegesis in the quote. The quote supports your words; it does not replace them, but elucidates them, perhaps providing the all-important warrant. Evidence is secondary to the argument you are making, even though the warrant may be in the evidence. The case is your claims, supported by evidence, not the evidence glued together by as few of your words as possible. This is a standard beginner’s error, after a beginner realizes that evidence is necessary. Starting out, a debater makes stuff up, then discovers that evidence is better, and then writes cases that are all evidence and no debater-written content, turning a case into not a position for or against but an aggregate of other people’s opinions, sort of like a live RSS feed. Not very convincing on the debate platform. The key point I want to make, though, is that evidence needs to be clearly tagged. When I am flowing I am going to write down the tag for your evidence. If I don’t have a tag for it, what do I write down? The whole thing? I’m not a court stenographer, after all. Tell me the meaning of the evidence at the top, and I’ll listen to the evidence for the crucial words that provide the support for that meaning. Otherwise I’ll listen to the evidence trying to figure out why you chose that piece of evidence. Which do you prefer?

Granted, this is Debate 101. But take a look at your cases. Look at the tops of the contentions. Look at the evidence tags. Are you making it easy for the note-taker in the back of the room? If not, do you really feel that you’re going to pick up that ballot?