Video transcript
CT - Coaching secondary debating - 12. Tips for affirmative teams

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HUGH BARTLEY: Hi, everyone. My name is Hugh. Today, we're going to be talking about tips for specifically the affirmative team in the debate and tips for specifically the negative team in the debate.

Ordinarily, most of the tips you'll hear in these videos and from your teachers and coaches and friends will be the same for each side of the debate. Make sure that your arguments and rebuttal are really strong. Make sure you've got good characterisation and smart mechanisms in your arguments.

But there are a couple of things that the affirmative has to do really, really well. And if they do do well, they will be ahead in the debate. And there are some things that the negative should really focus on their side. So we're going to get into those.

Let's stop in with the affirmative team first. There are two tips which I think are really important to understand if you're going into the debate as the affirmative. The first of them is always articulate the imperative of the debate.

What do I mean by that? Well, I mean to answer the question, why are we having the debate? What's the problem we're trying to solve? What are the most outrageous aspects of that problem? It's a really good start if you're the affirmative team.

Let me give you an example. Let's say we're doing the topic that all countries should stop funding their space exploration programs. An average first affirmative intro would say something like this. They'd say, oh, space exploration it's pretty expensive.

We're not really discovering much apart from rain, moon, . So it's a bit useless. But a really good first affirmative introduction would say something like this. Billions of people around the world live in poverty and have poor access to clean water and fresh food.

Huge numbers of kids don't go to school. Huge numbers of people die of preventable diseases. People get injured and die working their three jobs to stay alive.

Meanwhile, alongside all of this suffering, NASA and other national space agencies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to just create rockets that explode as soon as they're launched. People on Earth are dying, while the rich and powerful waste their hard earned tax dollars on useless space programs that just try to put a metal can on Mars. It's not fair.

So you see what I've done there. What I've done is I've really highlighted the problem that the debate tries to solve. That's the imperative. The benefit of doing this is that you emphasise the urgency of action to fix that problem because later in the debate the negative might go and point out small flaws.

They might say, well, our GPS systems aren't going to be as good if we can't have that many satellites in space. But you'll say, well, it doesn't matter if you're on a road in the bush somewhere and you're not quite sure where North is. If we've saved people from dying of malaria, then that is a big enough outcome to win the debate. So always pump up that imperative at the start of the debate if you're the affirmative team. Really tell me what is the problem, and what is the outrageous aspect of that problem that you're going to solve today.

Now let's talk about my second tip for affirmative teams in the debate. My second tip is always articulate your burden correctly. What do I mean by that? Well, the affirmative always supports a change to the status quo. They always have to support some change in law or in policy or something like that.

So the question is, what do you need to prove in order to show that change is a worthwhile change to make? And that's your burden i.e. What do you have to do to win the debate? The first thing to note with this is always to read the topic really, really carefully because let's say, in the space topic you have to show that we're not just going to reduce funding or fund more satellites and fewer rockets, but you have to prove that we would end all funding from all countries to space exploration. So that's what you have to prove.

And that essentially is your burden to prove that it's worthwhile, it's going to be more beneficial than costly to make that change. This is an important thing to do because it informs the way you'll run your arguments. Proving that, for example, sometimes space missions fail might not be enough to meet your burden.

Proving that in some countries the space, money would be redirected into social programs probably wouldn't be enough. Instead what you should aim to prove is that space programs are by and large systematically a failure and a waste of money and don't do humanity any good. And for the vast majority of governments and for the vast majority of space-exploring countries, the money that was put in those programs will be put to better use. So that's what you should aim to prove.

And even though you might aim to meet that burden, here's the important thing. Be careful not to articulate their burden that is actually that high. So you might have arguments which are really strong and demonstrate the strength of your arguments, demonstrate the strength of your case, however, you could say that, well, even if we get halfway there, we've still won the debate.

So in the space debate, you don't have to say that you need to prove that space programs do nothing for humanity. You just have to prove that money is probably more useful to humanity in some other area. You can do this really explicitly, if you want to. For example, you could say that even if we save only 100 additional children from the measles, that is a bigger benefit to society than if we discover some new mineral that makes our phone screens less likely to crack when we drop them. So do that trade off explicitly.

The last thing to note is that it's often useful to articulate the negative teams burden too. So try to show that it's quite a high burden for the negative in a lot of debates. So for example, in space in other areas of government spending we wouldn't tolerate gambling on some sort of return on our investment.

We normally require that the train line be used by people if the government is going to build it. We require perhaps not always in the best way that people who receive welfare don't waste that money on certain things. So the negative's burden this debate is to prove that space has a substantial return on the investment we put in i.e. equal to or greater than the money that's being spent should come back to us in some form.

So that's the tips for the affirmative team. Number one, articulate the imperative, why we're having a debate. And number two, articulate your burden. So try and have strong arguments that reach for the stars-- pardon the pun-- even though you might say you don't have to do much in order to show that your side of the debate is correct, while a negative team has to do quite a lot to meet their burden.