Writing a Constructive That Wins

Writing a Constructive That Wins - Aiden

The first impression you leave on a judge is just as important as the last. When you first walk into the room for your debate, you should know exactly how you will be supporting your side of the round in your first speech, the constructive. This guide will help you understand not only how to do so, but also how to write one that wins rounds before they even start.

Hopefully, you already know how to write a case. As you know, there are four elements of a case: the uniqueness, claim, solvency, and impact. However, I'll be referring to the 'claim' as a 'link,' as it internally 'links' the components of your case together. Make sure to not confuse these 'internal links' with 'links' from other areas of debate, like Ks. You probably already have an idea of how these components work together and maybe even have put them together into some of your own contentions. But, there is much more to each of these parts of a case than the surface level.

Here's a quick note: Many of the points in this guide are meant for "technical" or "flow" debate, but not "progressive" debate. However, most of these ideas can also be applied to "lay" debate.

Uniqueness

Uniqueness is often the most boring and least innovative part of a contention. However, that does not mean there is no room to be creative with your uniqueness. Rather than simply setting the stage for the rest of your case, uniqueness often requires refinement in order to be useful outside of establishing the current state of the world.

1 --- Brinkers.

One glaring issue with many cases I often stumble across in round or on the wiki is uniqueness that doesn't match with the rest of the case. By this, I mean when uniqueness does not indicate that the impact scenario will trigger. For example, any case that says X scenario causes extinction often fails to establish what point that scenario has evolved to. 

Oftentimes, this lack of uniqueness either indicates that the status quo should have already triggered extinction, which it obviously hasn't, or that the AFF doesn't make big enough of an impact to trigger extinction. However, having brinkers can solve this issue. 

Brinkers are a type of uniqueness that put a scenario 'at the brink,' meaning any change to the status quo will snowball into the impact triggering. Without brinkers, almost every CON contention that relies on the PRO triggering something that is bad would not have a realistic path to any large-scale impact.

For example, take this case from the FTC topic that is a great example of uniqueness that places the FTC and US government 'at the brink' of tradeoff or shutdown. This Nylen evidence explicitly calls the FTC "strapped for cash" and the next card explains that the US government is literally 'on the brink' of a shutdown that will happen in a few days (at the time of this debate)!

Without these cards, this contention would have no warrant for why the AFF would spiral into broad food insecurity. Unless you include a brinker, simply saying that the AFF causes a problem rarely means that that problem triggers a large-scale impact.

At the same time, make sure your uniqueness actually reasonably argues that a certain thing is 'at the brink.' This case about gold prices from Nueva (who won the TOC) is a poor example. A brief reading of their Foster evidence reveals that although it is tagged as "Gold prices are at a tipping point," Foster does not ever assert anything resembling a brink.

2 --- Impact Uniqueness.

However, no matter how good your uniqueness is at placing your link scenario at the brink, your impact scenario will feel lonely if it doesn't get any uniqueness too! By Impact Uniqueness, I mean a piece of evidence that provides a glimpse at what stage your impact is at in the world. For example, if your case is about US-Russia relations fracturing and causing war, it is extremely important that you have evidence saying what state US-Russia relations are in. Else, you run the risk of losing to a well-constructed argument that the US and Russia are already enemies.

In fact, even cases at the highest tiers of the national circuit often don't include impact uniqueness. Learning to exploit this by reading your own impact uniqueness as a response to your opponent's case or as a buffer for yours is a great way to exploit this weakness across almost every case you come across.

The same Fairmont case I mentioned earlier on the FTC topic has a glaring hole: Impact Uniqueness. That case lacks evidence about the strength of US agriculture, the DIB, or authoritarianism. In fact, many of their internal link cards give plenty of examples of all of those scenarios being in a poor state. It doesn't matter how strong every other part of your arguments are if a single, well-timed punch can make your case crumble. Of course, you can exploit this weakness in other cases while using it to strengthen your own.

Solvency

Solvency provides you with a way to solve your case. Not much more. The only 'trick' to solvency is giving yourself multiple ways to solve your impacts, but the benefit of doing so is so marginal that it hardly matters in rounds and does not matter enough to merit a multi-paragraph explanation, unlike our next subsection.

Internal Links

The most underutilized part of a case! Internal links are so important but also so overly simplified in almost all constructives. It's simple enough to find evidence saying that economic decline causes countries to spend less on their military, but innovating and using those links to gain more ground in a round can make the difference between winning and losing.

1 --- Defense

The simplest way to make your links do more for you is to turn them into defense. Oftentimes, internal links are only used as a platform to help construct a contention, but they can be extended into later speeches to be used as defense against your opponent's case. 

For example, let's say you find a great piece of evidence saying that climate change causes extinction. Great! That evidence works great to link your argument about climate change to the impact of  extinction. However, that link can do more for you. Instead, consider a piece of evidence that says climate change is the most likely path to extinction or even the only path to extinction. That evidence would not only serve as a link, but would also mitigate the probability or serve as an impact defense to your opponents non-climate change scenario. Using your cards to do more in a shorter time lets you make more arguments to win more debates.

Another reason why including defense inside your internal links is valuable is because they can be easily hidden in your case. Impact defense is underrated! If dropped, it alone can win you rounds. A single line in a card that says 'pandemics are the only plausible extinction path' will often be overlooked by your opponents and can be used as a terminal piece of defense nullifying your opponents arguments. A small effort to find evidence that includes defense inside will go a long way in round.

2 --- Hidden Links

Some people love them, some people hate them. However, no one can deny that hidden links can be used (or abused) to win rounds. The premise of a hidden link is to have an internal link inside of your case that can serve as an alternate way to access your impacts that is purposely hidden to make it less likely that your opponents see it and respond to it.

Let's imagine your case is about how the UK rejoining the EU will cause economic decline which causes death and conflict. An example of a hidden link would be that Russia sees the EU as weaker when their economy goes down, leading to them lashing out and igniting a hot war. Hidden links can be entirely hidden scenarios or just another link to the same impact. Either way, hidden links are another technique that can be used to crush your opposition in debates, especially in fast, technical substance debates where they can be missed easily.

Impacts

Impacts are often the simplest and most intuitive parts of a debate. Nuclear war is bad (or good). Poverty means a lot of people die. Dying is probably bad. Impacts are redundant and the impact cards that often get read are even more redundant (I'm looking at you, Stephen Clare). However, even the simplest of impacts can be used in unforeseen ways during a round to turn the tide of a debate.

1 --- What Outweighs Extinction?

To keep this guide substance-focused, we'll avoid out-of-round impacts and focus solely on (somewhat) common impacts that you may find in non-progressive rounds that still achieve the remarkable goal of outweighing extinction.

Still, being able to outweigh extinction matters a lot in the current debate "meta" of both sides with a (supposedly) infinite magnitude and low probability. Most rounds devolve into spamming jargon like "timeframe flips try or die" or "risk of offense." Instead of dealing with all of that, why don't we just find an impact with a greater magnitude than extinction?

These impacts include widespread human and animal suffering, but substantively, these arguments are closer to party tricks in debate rather than actual strategies. Either way, cases about things like Factory Farming, AI, and Authoritarianism sometimes utilize these impacts and claim that the issues that they are able to solve are more important than solving human extinction.

2 --- Impact Filters

In my opinion, the most satisfying way to win rounds is by using simple, yet effective arguments like impact filters. 

Impact filters are when a scenario, link, or impact on your side acts as a barrier that can solve other disadvantages of your side. For example, consider a pandemics contention that claims it can stop a pandemic. If it has the proper uniqueness about a pandemic occurring soon, this scenario can be used as an impact filter. 

Essentially, that team can read evidence about how pandemics stop wars from happening because they shut down global systems or deployment. In short, impact filters are another way to incorporate defense into your case that can be brought up later in a round to convert a close debate into a clean win.