Annotated prep

This page has prep (e.g. cases) from teams who have kindly annotated the documents, explaining why they included different phrases or pieces of evidence. You can see how different debaters (with different debating styles) construct cases and blocks, and the reasoning behind including different parts.

Septober 2019 - Aff case

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1myKg7gtUFImQwG6pBNDSU4fxheus-cYW

This was a case from the resolution "Resolved: the EU should join the Belt and Road Initiative." For context, the Belt and Road Initiative is China's policy platform to bring infrastructure across Europe and Asia, and the resolution asks whether the EU should join on.

Things to consider:

  • In second-half speeches, you won't be going for every card, which would take up too much time. Which cards do you think are absolutely essential to extend for solid offense in summary and final focus?

  • Where are the impacts?

  • This case has two sub-arguments. How are they positioned in the case, and what is the advantage of having these two? How are they similar? How are they different?

Nocember 2018 - Aff case (thanks Daisy Qiu!)

https://drive.google.com/open?id=18i6FBl9Jpw2o9CogfXsVEx92dcu_XlOu87HIxJetAw8

This was a case from the resolution "Resolved: the US federal government should impose price controls on the pharmaceutical industry." For context, the pharmaceutical industry makes many very expensive drugs which some believe are priced unfairly, and a price control would cap the price at which they could sell them.

Things to consider:

  • The case includes three reasons why decreased prices would save lives. Why did they choose to have multiple reasons for that particular level of the argument, and not three reasons why, say, price controls would decrease prices? Additionally, what justifies the ordering of the reasons?

  • This topic was pretty number-heavy. Where does the case include quantifications and why are those quantifications strategic?