 Imagine being in a round on the affirmative side of a topic. You spend a fair amount of time and effort putting together what you feel is a rock-solid case. You deliver the 1AC, and it goes really well. You are organized, persuasive, and perfectly fill out your time. When your opponent stands up to give their first speech, you feel a sinking feeling in your stomach, and a cold sugar runs down your spine. The order will be two off in case, starting with a topicality. Topicality is an argument that is often feared by novice affirmative teams. Many debaters fear of the argument is typically a sign of being unfamiliar with it. It's important not to panic. If you adopt a systematic approach, even an exceedingly well-constructed topicality can be beat. Today we will cover how to respond to topicality arguments. We will go over the best methods and how to answer the topicality argument, starting with the most important responses, before finally looking at a couple additional methods. Since topicality is a four-part argument structure, there are key places that you can make responses effectively. At the outset, you should make a decision how serious of a topicality challenge you are dealing with. Many negative teams run topicality as a way to test the aff. This means that they put it out there as an argument, but will typically kick out of it during their second speech, and go for other arguments. This is not to say that you should not take all topicality arguments seriously, keep in mind that if you fail to respond or lose a tea argument, then you are going to lose the debate. What this does mean is that you can make a couple of decisions how much time to spend refuting tea. Let's start by walking through the parts of a topicality and talk about some key things that you can do. First, the interpretation. Remember that the interpretation is an argument about what a word or phrase in the resolution means. In response to their interpretation, you should always start with the we-meet argument. This means that regardless of how they interpret the resolution, you should always argue that your plan meets it. For example, if their interpretation is that the resolution calls for you to use the United States federal government, and you fiat that the Federal Communications Commission would do the plan, you could argue, we meet. The FCC is an independent agency of the United States federal government. Having a we-meet argument gives you some coverage in the round. If you can't convince them to prefer the way you interpreted the resolution, you will not necessarily lose the debate. After you make a we-meet argument, you should almost always present your own counter-interpretation. The counter-interpretation is your argument for how the words in the resolution should be defined. If possible, try to provide a cited definition here. If you don't have one, try to be as specific as possible. Continuing our example of the FCC, your counter-interpretation could be that the United States federal government is any active body under the control of the executive, legislative, or judicial branches of the United States federal government. After providing your own counter-interpretation, quickly make a we-meet our counter-interpretation argument. It could just be a simple explanation of why your plan falls within the explanation you gave for your counter-interpretation. For example, we meet our counter-interpretation because the FCC is an agency under the jurisdiction of the executive branch of the federal government. Now that you have presented a counter-interpretation, it's time to argue that your counter-interpretation is preferable. This is done by presenting one or more counter-standards. These arguments function exactly like the standards the negative team proposes, except that the affirmative will want to choose standards that favor their interpretation. You can also choose to respond directly to the standards presented by the negative team and explain why your interpretation is better for each of those scenarios. The choice is very dependent on what the specifics of the round are. If you decide to only present your own counter-standards, you should still compare your counter-standards to those of the negative. It's probable that the counter-standards of the affirmatives will favor their interpretation of the resolution, and the negative standards will favor the negative interpretation. This means that the judge will have to decide which standards are the most important. To avoid judge intervention and the appearance that you did not respond to the standards on the flow, the affirmative team needs to make arguments for why the counter-standards that favor their interpretation are best. In addition to the competing's interpretation debate, there are a few other common strategies the affirmative can use to beat a topicality argument. First, your interpretation is bad. The strategy of this argument is to make a couple of quick arguments why the way the negative interpreted the resolution is bad for the debate. This is a very simple place for you to place analytical arguments as to why you do not think that you should lose the negative team's topicality position. Second, there is no abuse. Another way to take out the legs of a topicality was to prove that there is no abuse during the specific round. If the negative was prepared to debate the case and had the evidence to make case attacks and links to off-case arguments, then plan was not specifically abusive to them. Third, potential abuse is not a voter. It's very common for new debaters to under-articulate abuse when running topicality. Even at the upper tiers of competitive debate, it's not uncommon for debaters to read topicality arguments that only speaks to their potential for abuse. Without any specific instances where ground was lost or skewed. In these instances, you should argue that the judge should not vote in a topicality unless the negative team can evidence that they have been disadvantaged in a specific and meaningful way. Next, topicality silences important voices. Affirmatives can argue that topicality is just another meaningless procedure that prevents important ideas from being debated. In the real world, important ideas are often not heard or even ignored by policymakers because they originate from people who have unpopular opinions. In city councils, board meetings, and even U.S. congressional hearings, rules and procedures are used as a means to silence these voices. You can argue that this is what the negative is trying to do by running their topicality argument. What you've heard today represents a decent primer on how you can respond to a topicality argument. We covered the methods that you can use to adequately defend yourself from tea. Keep in mind that these are only the basic methods of dealing with tea. As you advance as a debater, you will be likely exposed to other theories and ideas for answering these types of arguments. So the next time you find yourself up against a topicality in a round, don't panic. It's no scarier than any other argument in the debate. Thanks for watching. This video series is written and produced by me, Ryan Guy, with the help of a wide variety of scholarly research and open educational resources. For more information on the references and materials used in this video, please see the description page on YouTube. This video is published under a Creative Commons license. Please feel free to share, use, and remix its content.