Giving a Summary

How to Give a Summary in PF

By Rian Chadha

The summary is arguably the most important speech in Public Forum debate. In just three minutes, you must 

condense the round and make key strategic decisions, which is why learning how to give an effective summary is essential. This guide aims to help you do exactly that.

Recap: Rebuttal

In rebuttal, both teams should respond to their opponents’ case in various ways, such as turns, no-link, and non-unique arguments (for a more in-depth overview, see the rebuttal guide). In summary, your job is to rebuild your case, extend responses on their case, and then weigh your impacts against your opponent’s.

1st Summary

First summary is widely considered the hardest speech in Public Forum debate, because you have to do the job of second rebuttal—attacking their case and defending (frontlining) your own—in one less minute. On top of that, you also need to weigh. The first thing you should do in first summary is return to your case. Before you start speaking, decide which contention you want to pursue. You should then extend that contention with a quick 20–30 second overview of your entire link chain, and then answer each response the second rebuttal made on it. It is important that you only go for one contention, which is called collapsing, because otherwise you will run out of time to do the other things you need to do (this is also explained in the rebuttal introduction). Ideally, this should take roughly one minute.

Next, you should either weigh or extend responses on your opponents’ case. You can do these in either order, but weighing is very important, so you need to leave adequate time for it. When you weigh, you should compare your impacts and your opponents’ impacts using a few weighing mechanisms. The main three are magnitude (how many people your impact affects—for example, your impact kills 20,000 people whereas your opponents’ only kills 5,000), scope (how widespread your impact is—for example, your impact affects the whole world whereas your opponents’ only affects one country), and timeframe (whose impact happens first). There are also other mechanisms like try-or-die, prerequisite, and short-circuit, but those are a bit more complex. It is very important that your weighing is comparative. For example, instead of saying, “My impact outweighs on magnitude because it kills 5 million people,” you should say, “My impact outweighs on magnitude because it kills 5 million people and theirs only kills 5,000.” Weighing should probably take around 30–45 seconds but can be longer depending on how much time you have left.

When extending responses on your opponents’ case, it is crucial that you do not introduce new answers. Your partner spent four minutes responding to your opponents’ case, so you should use the answers they already made. This is especially important because you are not allowed to make new answers to your opponents’ case in summary. It is also important that you do not just restate the response they made. You should briefly re-explain it and then defend your response. Your opponents will have made some sort of answer to it in their rebuttal, so you need to answer their answer to ensure your response has full weight. You do not have time to extend every answer, so only pick the most important ones. You should also consider probability—how likely it is that your impact will occur compared to your opponents’. 

2nd Summary

In second summary, you should do all the same core tasks, but your partner will already have defended your case in second rebuttal. When you are frontlining your case, make sure you extend their frontlines and explain why they effectively answer your opponents’ responses.

Efficiency

Summary is a very time-crunched speech because there is so much to do in only three minutes. You should 

make sure that you do not spend too long on any one part of the speech, because splitting your time well is crucial to setting your team up for a strong final focus.