Tips on Writing an Affirmative
As the season starts to get in gear (first tournaments were at Wyoming at Purdue this weekend) some of you are scrambling to get your affirmative ready for competition. Here are a couple of tips to help you finish up.
1. Start with solvency. Always start with an advocate. The hard part is finding an advocate. If you spend hours cutting and filing harms and inherency evidence, you might be wasting your time if you never find solvency evidence.
2. How to find an advocate. Advocates are also the most difficult thing to find. However, when you do, these articles are goldmines. They will have solvency, answers to potential negative case arguments, harms and inherency. So where should you look to find these gems? I suggest Policy Institutes and Think Tanks. It is the job of those authors to offer policy solutions to problems. You should also learn how to power search. Improve your google searches by using quotation marks. Search for things like “United States should” or “United States must” and then add other things to the search string like “Greater Horn”, specific countries, or a type of problem like “HIV/AIDS” or “famine.” Finally, use the power search function of Lexis-Nexis. Use modifiers like w/5, w/10, w/s and w/p. This will help you search for instances where certain words appear within 5 or 10 words from each other or are in the same sentence or paragraph. I cannot stress how important it is to start with solvency evidence.
3. Stay organized. As you find and cut evidence, make sure you keep it organized. Sometimes its good to have several documents open at once. Put harms evidence into one document, solvency in another, and maybe other documents for inherency and different advantages. This will help you a lot later as you start putting together the 1AC. You’ll have ALL of the solvency in one place to pick the best ones for the 1AC, rather than jumping around one big and long master document.
4. Write answers to potential arguments. Before you go to your first tournament, you should have already thought about what you will say in your 1AR. How will you answer that pesky T argument that probably applies to your case? What will be your strategy against China DAs? You need to write out frontlines to these common arguments and include them in your affirmative file. It’s always better to overprepare.
5. When you think you are done, you’re not. An affirmative is not meant to be static. As you travel to tournaments, change your affirmative. Respond to arguments by changing the wording of plan text. Add new advantages to keep people guessing. If a card is giving you problems, replace it. Keep reading the research on your aff and stay deeper in the literature than everyone else. You get to run the aff every other round, they only debate against it every once in a while. You will only exacerbate this advantage the deeper into the lit you get.
I hope this helps you get started and finish off your affirmative cases. Take great care with them, they are your biggest advantage in debate.
John Boyer
Lafayette College
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