 Okay, so today we are here to talk about writing and structuring your affirmative LD cases. How many of you have learned at least a little bit about debate or LD at this point? Okay, so a few of you. One of the things I have here for you is packets of evidence. So you'll get to see a sample case that you'll actually be using later on in the day. But before we do that, I want to talk a little bit about the basics of Lincoln-Douglas debate. So first of all, just some basic background on it. Where did the name Lincoln-Douglas come from? It actually came from a series of seven debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas in the 1800s. And they were obviously through campaigning and the core of their debates was really about the ethics of slavery. And so traditionally Lincoln-Douglas debate has been value-based. So looking at those sort of deeper, more basic beliefs. But later on it evolved to emphasize policy. So a lot of the resolutions you'll hear will be about taking specific actions, usually at the federal level. The way LD works, you get one policy resolution for the academic year. And it's generally specific, so you all have to talk about the same topic. But it's broad enough that you have a lot of room to interpret and bring your own unique cases to the round. So this year the resolution is resolved. The U.S. federal government should increase its development of the Earth's moon in one or more of the following areas. Energy, minerals, and or water. So sometimes the resolutions are mouthful. But as you can see, sort of guides you as to what topic you're going to talk about. But you have some room to interpret there. The way the LD round looks is that there's two debaters. One affirmative debater and one negative debater. And you have specific time allotments and you take turns giving your speeches. So the times are up here. There's going to be five speeches total. The first affirmative constructive is six minutes. And that's where you lay out your case, which is what we're going to be talking about today, how to build that. The first negative constructive is a seven minute speech in which they respond to the first one. And then you can see it goes back again. So then you have your first affirmative rebuttal, which is another six minutes. The first negative rebuttal for six minutes. And then the second affirmative rebuttal for three minutes, which is the last speech in and around. The other thing about Lincoln Douglas is that you have set times for asking one another questions. So you get three minutes after the first affirmative and after the first negative to ask the other speaker questions about their case. So the other thing you get in a Lincoln Douglas round is four minutes of prep time to use however you like. Generally people will take maybe two minutes before their second speech and another two minutes before their last speech. And for the negative they would take two minutes before their first speech and two minutes before their second one. But you can sort of break that time up however you like over the course of the round. We're doing good so far. So when it comes to LD, there's a couple of things that as the affirmative you are solely responsible for. These are called your burdens. So the affirmative burdens include the burden of proof, which is that you need to provide arguments that justify or demonstrate the need for change. So generally the way resolutions are worded is there a call to change from whatever currently exists. So as the affirmative you can't really defend the status quo but you need to sort of justify that need for change, that call to action. The other important thing you need to do is have a prima facie case. And this means sort of at first look or on face that your case is complete enough to persuade a reasonable person at first glance that those changes are needed. And what prima facie really means is do you have all of your stock issues. So stock issues are what we're going to talk about today. There's two different ways we're going to talk about constructing a case. The first one, the affirmative is hips. And that's because you lay out, first of all, harms. So you give examples and explanations as to what the need is for change in the status quo. So identifying problems that exist that need to be fixed. The second component is adherency. What prevents those harms from being fixed in the status quo is there's some sort of roadblock that keeps them from solving themselves. E.g., why do we need your plan to put this into action? And there's your actual plan. So how do you as the affirmative think that we should fix those problems? And then solvency is the last component. So this is an explanation of how your plan will solve the harms that you started out talking about. And you want to know or you want to make note if additional good things will happen. Yes? That's why I want to interrupt. I think that I was supposed to go to the parliament to debate once again. Yeah, go for it. I'm sorry. You will see an additional sort of component to this when you're hearing other people use these structures where they'll have an entirely separate section for advantages or benefits to the plan that comes out of your song. We'll go over these in a little bit more detail. But this is sort of one of the first structures that you can use when you're putting a case together. The second type is an advantages-based structure. And this is a little bit different. It still includes all of the same components, but they're reorganized. So you can start with inherency, which is again that explanation of the roadblocks that currently exist. Move into your plan, so whatever your proposal is. And then you have different advantages and the sub points under there are an explanation of a harm, explaining how your plan solves that harm specifically, and then talking about the benefits of solving that harm. And you would do that for however many advantages you have, whether that's two or more. So it's the same information, just reorganizing it a little bit. You might see other variations on case construction too. There's not really a universal style that people use. But once you get more familiar with the event, you will definitely start recognizing which components are which and how to argue those. One of the things about LD is that it's an evidence-based event. So I want to make sure that you get these packets of evidence. These are a good example of how cases might be laid out, as well as the way to format evidence for that. This is the affirmative case here. I'm going to give you the negative evidence as well, just so that you have it for later. I assume that you can have more than two advantages, or is it limited only to? It's not limited. You can have more than two. Generally, you'll only be limited by the time constraints. So if you can fit it in for six minutes, you're good. So the evidence cards that you have there, if you open up the first page, you'll see what some of them look like. Basically, this is how you include your information. It's kind of if you were writing an essay and you were going to cite a quotation. How would you incorporate that into your overall argument? So the way that these are set up is that there's a tagline. You'll see at the top that there's like a bold sentence. And that's basically your topic sentence or your thesis statement for that argument. When you're reading this evidence in a debate round, that's the part that you would really want to emphasize and say clearly, because that's the part that people will be writing down. After that, there's the citation. And you can see both on this example and in your packet, the first part of it, so the author of the organization and the date are bolded. And that's the part that you would read out loud from that citation. And then after it, there's more complete information included in there, but you won't read that out loud. But if your opponent asks to see your evidence, they can see the full citation of where that information came from. And then in terms of the actual content of that card, that's the evidence that you would read. And there should be specific sentences that are bolded. Those sentences are the ones you'll read, but you have to leave the other information in for context. Again, if your opponent asks to see the card, they need to be able to see the entire context of where your sentences came from. So this is something that your coaches will probably work with even more in detail on. And a lot of teams also work together as a team to develop a team case and then once they're more experienced, sort of break off and develop several lines. Applying some of these concepts that we've been talking about for stock issues, let's say that our resolution is homework should be eliminated. What kind of harms would justify the need for an action like that? What's bad about homework? It takes too much time. Okay, it takes a lot of time. It's not fun to do. Not fun to do. They should be able to cover the material in class. Okay, do you use class time to cover content? Great, so maybe some of the things right, like if students don't have enough time to complete their homework and have a good life balance, maybe they're not getting enough sleep, not at their highest learning capacity during class. All of those things might be things that you lay out in the harm scenarios of your first affirmative constructed. And for each of those, obviously you would cite evidence, right? Maybe you want to say that after students finish their homework, the next class period starts too early in the morning and then you would cite things about how problematic the lack of sleep is for students. How about an adherency? I want to make a note about an adherency here. This can be two different types. It can either be structural, so something existing sort of is legitimately blocking it from happening. So maybe there's a law that prevents or requires something. Or it can be attitudinal, so that sort of appeal to tradition. Oh, we keep doing this because we've been doing it. So social norms, values, or beliefs can be attitudinal. So in terms of banning homework or eliminating homework, what in the status quo would keep that from happening? Yes? The lack of time teachers feel that they have in the classroom to cover the material. Okay, great. So there's that tension between wanting to finish the work in class but maybe just not having enough time to do it. And do you think that would be structural or attitudinal? That would be more structural. Okay. Because it's sort of that specific timeframe that you're working with. Is there anything else? A lot of times students have to pocket a lot of money out of their own budgets and some students do not have access to a lot of resources. And so that might be also financial burden upon them. Okay. So that might be kind of a structural tendency that can... Well, it might be attitudinal, but I think it's more structural because it's like if you're not affluent, if you're affluent then you have the advantage. Because then you can afford tools and computers and those things you might need. Okay, sure. Yeah. And if you don't maybe you have to maintain a job outside of school, right? You probably have more time for homework versus if you go straight to work afterwards. Okay, yeah. So we've got some external factors that are keeping policies like this in place. When it comes to the plan, this is also... There's some variations here, but generally the things that you as an affirmative want to have in mind for your plan are the mandate. So what is your specific course of action? So what are you specifically going to do to change the status quo? And that's called the mandate. There's also the agent which is the individual or the organization who enacts the plan. So who puts it into action and makes things happen? The enforcement and this is the person who enforces the plan. So maybe you have one organization pass a law, but then a separate entity would have to make sure that that law is actually being enforced. Funding is an explanation of how the plan will be paid for. There's a couple of things that you can do here. You can say normal means and that might mean like either through taxes or through sort of grants that maybe like schools regularly get that's planned for in the budget. So normal means can sort of take care of your funding. And sometimes plans don't require funding. Other ones you might need to identify a specific source depending on what your plan topic is. And then the last component is the timeline. So when the plan will happen. A lot of times in LinkedIn Douglas you won't necessarily hear speakers go through all of these planks for the plan, but they're definitely something to keep in mind and if you are on the negative certainly think about asking the affirmative about these specifics because if they don't have those answers that might mean there's weaknesses in their plan. So with our sample resolution homework should be eliminated. What are the logistics of that? How would we actually implement that plan? It makes me sick. Yeah, so how, yeah. So what you do is you work with the, okay so homework should be eliminated by increasing classroom time for students to build complete tasks within the classrooms and to change the policy to, you know, the school's policy, the university policy to the work like that. Okay, so sort of working to make other adjustments to make that plan work. Sure. Yeah, and so part of it would just be even beyond like making those extra adjustments because that might sort of go beyond what the resolution is calling you to do. You might even just say okay well, you know, schools will no longer require homework and go through whatever that is sort of like a school board or whatever that might need to go through. Or maybe that they provide it homework. Okay, yeah, sure. Right, like maybe schools get like funding withdrawn if they're requiring homework or something. And that might be part of like the enforcement for that plan, right? Okay, and then the solvency is the last component. So how would this action, how would eliminating homework solve the harm to some of the ones that you threw out at the start? People would get more sleep, more time to work and do productive things. Okay. Yeah, being more aware during classroom time. Okay, great, yeah. So to a certain extent sometimes solving the evidence is just explaining like why those harms no longer exist. So it's not that difficult in terms of explaining why it's solved. And then additional advantages that maybe aren't related to solving those specific harms or sort of unexpected benefits, you can also include those as advantages of the case. Any questions about this overall sort of structure or process? Okay, if you look at your packet of evidence, you'll see that this one is set up a little bit differently, right? This one is set up like the advantage structure. So the one that we just worked through was the hip structure. But if you look at here, you'll see that it starts with inherency and then moves on to the plan and you can see that this one specifies some of those components. So timeline, funding, agent and enforcement. And then on the third page, you can see that it moves into the specific advantage. And like I said, the LD topic this year is about the moon and there's a separate session on that. But then you can see how it sort of goes through the different components of the advantages and sort of explains like how these actions are going to solve some of those harms. So hold on to that. So in our last few minutes, I think we're still trying to stay on schedule with getting out here by 950 or so. I want you to work through this new resolution, maybe partner up with someone and come up with a basic outline of that hip structure. So if your resolution was resolved, the U.S. federal government should legalize marijuana. Think about what are some of the harms that would justify legalizing marijuana? What's currently in place keeping marijuana from becoming legalized? What could you do to sort of change, actually legalize it? And then how would legalizing have solved on ours that you came up with? Take a few minutes. Maybe partner up or you can just throw your ideas out and we can talk about them. I think I have a lot of time. You guys want to get together? Yeah. Let's get together. So I'll sit here because if you want to hear what she means or I can go over there. Yeah, I'll go over there. Sweet. I'm going to make a little texture block here. Sweet. So what are the harms? The harms of having marijuana. So are the harms for legalizing it? Sure. Or for not legalizing it? It would be for not legalizing it. So as the affirmative current, what are the harms of having marijuana? So we're trying to be too non-legalizing. People are in jail. This is your job to prove this. So we're saying the harms of having a cannabis flow. Right. So what are the problems? The first thing I can think of would be the medical benefits. Okay, so that's not a harm. No, harms are like... No, it's not using it. Right? The lack of use of medical benefits. Of not legalizing it. You just reshape the way you're saying that. Yeah. So if you said like a harm is that more people can't be using it. For medication, because it's not legalized. There's none of the benefits that people cannot use. Because it's illegal. Yeah. Okay. What's the harm? Do you have one? What were you saying? Okay, we have prison overflow. Should we make people go? Okay, so should we make people go to prison over maybe a trifle thing? Yes. Okay, how about you? How about you? We lose revenue that the government can use through taxation and taxing corporations and those kinds of things that could get into development. We also lose touch with safety. The government can enforce safety standards over something that's not legal. You see what I mean? The FDA can't help to say, oh well, this marijuana is all full of heroin and meth. So don't use it. This one's like, you know, U.S. D.A. fruit. Yeah. It's another thing that's kind of sketchy by people. Right. Well, because you don't get it at a gas station. Well, yeah, that's kind of what I was going to say. Public health. Yeah, public health. It's not regulated really right now. That's right. So cartels and drug dealers, I don't know, it's like dangerous and can get out of control. That's right. Yeah, these guys are scary. Yeah, these guys are scary. They always bring guns and goons with them. Yeah. That's a great list of harms. So then what would the coherency be? So, coherency. Like what's preventing us from doing that? Government, man. Government. Definitely. So that's like a structural right? So government has a law. They got to figure out a way to tax it. And so, well, they have to figure out a way to rewrite the law. And how are you? I was very out of tune. People have sometimes bad impressions of what's going on. It's right on. Are you using drugs? Yeah, or are you using drugs with the, I don't know, what's justified and what's not justified? Okay. How are you? I don't know if that's different. Morals? I don't know. I would say something along the lines of that the government could potentially be critical if they reverse course. If they spend all this money to try to make it a leak, try to convince people if they can make them lose face or make you credibility. Although I don't think that's a very good reason. So the federal government, so this is not nationwide legalization? That's what this is like. Not states. Okay. Sometimes the federal government has it as a class one or class five, whichever is the most extreme. Schedule five drug. Schedule five drug. And so, and they're reluctant to remove the very dangerous drugs on that schedule five and like, you know, want to. Yeah. From the list. And other things like Clorox bleach and pneumonia are probably on that list of if you drink it or something. Yeah. Not really. This is a great list. And just to you don't necessarily have to include total structural and attitudinal. You can have just one in here. Whereas they'll want several hours. And there's also just the divide between people in general for and against it. There's not like an overwhelming stance in any over nationwide over its legalization. At least in some places there is. It's a plan. All the scholars are going to vote. Yeah. Well, that's what I think matters. So. Misconception maybe or prejudices against the use of marijuana? People are probably informed about like realistically the pros and cons of. Right. Everyone's different. So are we going to plan yet? Yeah, I just want to say one thing about this. So definitely this process of thinking of and researching all the possible sort of road blocks is great. And then you want to pick like the one or two things you can find the best evidence for and that are the most persuasive. So you don't want to you don't want to use too many in here and see that. Right. Because keep in mind that part of your job is to not only identify the in here and see but then overcome that in here and see. So you don't necessarily want to come up with so many arguments that it's impossible for you to get past. All right. Moving on to plan. So this is this. I want to do all degree. Or at least I have degree. So what are we going to do about it? That doesn't seem to do a lot for the national government. You know, vote on our politician tubing? Colorado. The vote for Colorado is present. You've got to put it on a bill or a ballot. No, no, that's so many statewide. The government doesn't do that. Well, yeah, that's true. It could either be like you could have a certain amount of lead or legalized growing it yourself or the government would regulate it probably and be able to sell it if they sell it out the whole. Okay. So then maybe lobby Congress and the president and state legislatures. Because the more states prove it, the more it makes it hard for the federal government to keep not approving it. So lobby has entities to maybe put it on ballot initiatives on the state so that it puts pressure on the federal government. Can the plan be like two-fold of multiple things, like change the schedule of the drug and then put it under state classification and alcohol, like two steps? Yeah, so a couple of things. One thing that you're thinking about is like what can citizens do to sort of make the government do this other thing like voting or lobbying. And as the affirmative debater, you actually are that policymaker and you have the power of what's called fiat, which is like a magic one. You get to wave it once for your plan and say that this plan will happen. So instead of needing to rally the voters, you can say we'll legalize marijuana. Like that will happen. And that's sort of your prerogative as the affirmative because that's what the resolution is asking you to do right. So the plans we will legalize marijuana and have it be classified under similar laws to those rather than regulating alcohol. Except for alcohol, we'll also be changing the age of 18 because I don't know why it's the only thing in the country that's aged 21. So you're an adult, but don't drink. That's illegal and we're going to send you to an adult prison if you do it. It's sort of stupid. After a country, I get the pressure on you just don't go have a coffee. That's true in the military. You can't drink alcohol. You know that if you're under 21. Is that bullshit? Okay. Anyways. And then what was some of those like some points of plan B? So in terms of the, this is the mandate. What about agent and enforcement? No agent. The federal government would be the Congress with presidents and the president because they have to assign it would be the agents. Okay. Right. And then would we need separate enforcement? Probably just be like police officers. Yeah. Yeah. The same entities that you just expand those entities that would be good alcohol stuff and make them do the marijuana stuff too. Okay. We already have probably too many of those in place already. Right. But you know, you just use it say once. Why? Why have you made the will? Right. Sure. There's already like an organization in place to manage that. Okay. Seven. Funding. Would you need money to do this? We wouldn't need much money because once you change the laws kind of done, you would need some money for to expand maybe the agency so that their staff appropriately took care of it. But wouldn't that be normal? Do it? Because it's a bill taxing it. It would be, it would be normally, that's right. And so the, that was part of the plan. It's like you need money. But the, how you get the money is to in the same way you do for alcohol. Alcohol is a tax applied to it when you buy it. And so too would marijuana. Great. So as the affirmative, all you have to say is this will be taken care of through normal means. And then if someone asks you that information, it's great if you're informed about it and you can explain it. Okay. Tax. Yeah. Awesome. Okay. And then timeline. Within one week. Okay. I'm kidding. That's ridiculous. Maybe as soon as possible. Yeah. Well. That's a common one that you'll hear. That's actually an answer. Yeah. That's it. It seems like a very common answer. It seems to be a very convenient answer. All they see, everything you do will do as soon as possible. As soon as possible. And then what about solvency? Which is what happened. How does it get rid of the wrongs? Yeah. How does it solve these harms? So, well, with more marijuana, with, you know, going through the proper channels, you know, a safer product that people who need it for medical purposes will have access to. People would not, it'll reduce prison overcrowding because people would not be put into prison because of marijuana related possession and use loss. Right. Or possibly even sales loss. We would gain tax revenue because we're taxing it. As far as safety standards, those would be more regulated. Yeah. I would assume there's probably more safety around informing people about how to use it and what it might feel like because alcohol is legal. And I think that schools, there's just more information on it. Okay. When it's legal, because it's more publicly understood, it seems like. So, if it was legalized, then people would probably understand it. Okay. So, more informed public? Yeah. Okay, great. Yeah. So, sort of going through and explaining how this simple act of legalizing marijuana can take care of all these bad things that currently exist. So, this is a great example of the structure that you can use, especially for when you're first getting into debate. This is often sort of an easier structure for people to wrap their minds around than the advantages structure. Obviously, play with it. Work with your coach to see what's going to work best for you all and your team. But this is one way to include all of those components and make that logical argument. You can see how each element is related to the next in terms of working through that process. Any questions about any of the things that we've talked about so far? Okay. Well, you all did a really nice job with that. Remember to hold on to your packet. If you do have questions later, feel free to come find me. Other than that, that's all I've got for this session. And have fun in the other ones. Thank you. Thank you. Sorry if we're done. Oh, thank you.