Over the last few months, I’ve maintained a form on my site in which students can write in to ask about parts of debate they find unintuitive. The exercise has helped me gain valuable insight into what troubles high school students who don’t have much access to camp or coaching, and has (hopefully) allowed me to clear up some points of confusion. But one unusually popular question has been vexing me for weeks, and goes something like this:
Truf, what do I do if my opponent is being so unclear in their speech that I cannot flow what they are saying, but I can’t call them out on it because I know or suspect that the judge is flowing the doc?
Such informational asymmetries undermine a foundational, if unspoken, premise of competitive debate: that all participants—judges and teams alike—operate from a shared knowledge of what has occurred in the round. Such reciprocity is so basic that courts have treated it as sacred for centuries: private “ex parte” communications between one side and the judge are prohibited almost per se as an affront to adversarial integrity and the rule of law. The prohibition on clipping in debate is, in part, based on this same intuition.
And yet hundreds of students debating unclear opponents face a staggering information asymmetry: since they don’t know whether their judges are flowing the doc, they cannot know what parts of their opponents’ speeches the judge has received and understood. Meanwhile, doc-flowing—an arguably reasonable adaptation to sound garbled by cheap hardware and spotty internet in Zoom debates—has been gaining prevalence, even after most students have resumed debating in person. A generation of judges that mastered debate during COVID and knows no other way has migrated from the home office to the back of the high school classroom, and continued to compensate for incomprehensible delivery by reading debaters’ analytics in the speech document.
Opacity in judging practices creates perverse strategic incentives. Debaters must either restrict responses to audibly comprehensible claims, unwittingly “dropping” arguments the judge followed only because they were reading along, or answer the doc, assuming its fidelity to actually delivered arguments. Given the asymmetry between the harms of choosing incorrectly, it is not surprising that debaters operating under uncertainty often choose to answer the doc. Equally unsurprising is the spike in debaters answering off case arguments not actually read in speeches or weaponizing speech doc dependence by omitting crucial analytics and theory arguments in order to win on a cheap shot. Such adaptations are as rational as the now-standard practice, developed in response, of burning valuable CX time to check for “hidden” perms or theory arguments.
Even worse, this limited, pragmatic adaptation has ended up normalizing an incredibly destructive set of practices. Some debaters now write their speeches directly in their prep documents, effectively replacing traditional flowing with only the record implied by their responses. Why write anything down when the “transcript” is already in front of you? When both sides do this, neither retains a graphical representation of how arguments evolve across speeches and references to such evolution in rebuttals become few and far between. Also lost is the mental step of choosing how to record opponents’ arguments, previously critical to the process of parsing a speech. Little do debaters realize that the “transcript” is actually an informational firehose: thousands of words flash by in minutes, but few are retained, and even fewer are understood.
I am not without sympathy for the judges and students who have created this situation. All young judges are inexperienced at judging, yet the debate community, too deeply committed to supposedly meritocratic criteria for social status, has little grace to offer the inexperienced. Even debaters with a good deal of experience need time to adjust to their new role; learning to judge often requires experimentation with different approaches. Yet many perceive (with good reason!) that a single decision in which they miss an argument can damage their reputation with active competitors, possibly for generations to come. Young judges need the most room to breathe and yet, with their limited track records and direct residual ties to current debaters, experience this dynamic most acutely.
Quite a predicament. What to do? I have two sets of humble requests—one to students, and one to judges.
Give your judges grace. Coaches’ and judges’ experience of debate tournaments is indescribably different from competitors’. It is challenging, it is full of exhausting and thankless tasks, disciplinary conversations no one will ever hear about, hours on the phone litigating with the travel agency and rental car company, reimbursement forms, food logistics, and the emotional labor of supporting students navigating a high-stress academic environment. It is fueled not by adrenaline, but by passion for teaching and for the game.
Of course, none of these considerations absolve your judges of the basic duties of courtesy and professionalism. They do, however, give rise to some student obligations in return. Listen to RFDs with empathy. Nothing is accomplished by attempting to humiliate the person who is trying to help you grow when you perceive that they have made a mistake. Remember: your judges are human, and only half of the equation in a bilateral communication failure that you, too, helped to bring about—particularly if you knew they wouldn’t flow your speech doc in advance. Instead of viewing such breakdowns with frustration, treat them as a learning moment about how to speak the language of a judge who, given our small and close-knit community, will be deciding your competitive fate in many rounds to come.
Judges should indicate on their philosophies the procedure they use to record information about the debate and the sources of information used to perform this task. I do not see any other way to begin breaking the cycle. We have reached a point where any judge who has their computer open but has not described their flowing style explicitly is guilty until proven innocent. If you are, in fact, flowing the speech document—that’s fine, but only if everyone is on the same page about what is taking place. If you are not—that’s great! Saying so explicitly will authorize teams to hold the line on clarity, as well as put unclear debaters on notice: communicate, or lose.
What precisely should be disclosed? Generally, you should reveal anything potentially useful to a debater seeking to make themselves understood. This is hard to distill to a universal list; you, yourself, know better than anyone how the idiosyncrasies of your process influence your judging. As long as you are honest and transparent, the disclosure is likely to be helpful. Here are some things to consider:
I sympathize with the fear of making public mistakes. I have plenty of poorly delivered, poorly reasoned RFDs under my belt. I have missed arguments, from trivial to decisive. Even if I hadn’t, some debaters are dismissive of all judges who vote against them; such frictions cannot be avoided. On this, I can offer three pieces of perspective.
First, remember that debaters ultimately carry the burden of persuasion. A debate judge cannot give an “incorrect” decision. To paraphrase Justice Robert Jackson’s famous quip about the Supreme Court, your authority to decide a winner is not final because it is infallible—it is infallible only because it is final. When there are arguments or interactions you did not understand, it is by definition the case that the debaters did not effectively communicate them. The same is true of arguments you missed entirely. You owe the debaters you judge your best effort—no judge can promise or offer any more than that.
Second, consider that it is likely more embarrassing when a decision reveals that you were flowing the doc despite not having disclosed this in advance. You are no less likely to make mistakes of this kind than debaters, and debaters make them often.