In which we fume

Somehow I have found myself judging PF for Lexington at the upcoming NDCA. Being a conscientious sort, I went over to NSDA and read the April resolution. It only took half an hour, which may be a personal record. I had to take a cold shower when I was finished.

If I’ve said it once I’ve said it, well, more than once: the best resolutions are the shortest. The more words they throw at a topic in order to limit it, the more likely they are to screw it up. For that matter, even when it’s only a few words, getting cute (like, in my opinion, limiting March to Okinawa rather than Japan), is problematic. Plain and simple is best, because then debaters can just debate it instead of trying to explain it, or worse, understand it in the first place. Then again, my DJ work is entirely in aid of terseness, of getting to the point, of eliminating excess verbiage, and generally making text as clear as possible. We don’t literally simplify things, we just make them shorter. When my writing gets most concise is when I write a blurb, where I have one sentence to describe an entire book. And not a famous book (“Moby-Dick: It’s about this whale…” as Comden and Green would have it) but a book you may not have even heard of that I want you to read and enjoy. I also have 4-sentence jacket blurbs. They’re a little easier, but they still have to do a lot of work, setting up a story, making you want to read it and not giving anything away. Anyhow, the point is, wordsmiths probably all cringe at prolix and/or unclear resolutions for platonic reasons, but one imagines that debaters cringe for practical reasons. So it goes. So, for that matter, has it always gone.

Just to put things into focus, keep in mind that just thinking about the last two sentences of Charlotte’s Web have made me tear up ever since I first read the book to my daughter.

Oh, well. It will only be a couple of rounds. I’ll bring some pens and paper with me—I prefer flowing on paper since I don’t judge enough to have good proficiency doing it with a keyboard—and I’ll probably enjoy it quite a bit, since there’s nothing quite like a good debate round. With luck, there will be an evidence indictment, and I’ll have to DQ a team (or not) and then go defend the decision to the Star Chamber that is usually me and the usual suspects but this time will be… God only knows. Aaron Hardy? Hmmmm.

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