How to Craft Amazing Lincoln-Douglas Rebuttals | Chris Park

"Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." "I still have a dream, it is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream." "Never give in, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense." Welcome to the On Point Podcast. This is your host, Luke Yeltshaw, a first year hailing from Region 8 based in NCFCA. This is a weekly podcast where I'll have a guest on the show and cover something in speech or debate. I hope you enjoy this episode. Welcome back to the On Point Podcast. Today I'm with Christian Park, who is a Lincoln Douglas qualifier tournament winner. He won 8th place at Nationals. He's an official rhetoric blogger. He's not very good at speeches and he's very much stronger than me. Welcome to the show, Christian. Hey, thanks for having me, Luke. Yeah. I think that second and last part is pretty true. I heard that you weren't very good at speeches, right? So here's the thing. I like to think of myself as a good speaker, but when it comes to competitive speeches, I just don't have what it takes. My speaks are, I think, fine when it comes to debate, but in terms of, like, passion and storytelling, I think I'm definitely lacking. Yeah. So I'm glad you're good at rebuttals, or at least I hope, because that's what we're going to be talking about today. So I'm going to be asking you a few questions. So you already know. That's good. Into it. All right. So how important do you think rebuttals are to the debate? So how, yeah. So I think rebuttals really is the debate. I think rebuttals make up the debate because when you think about a debate, it's a conversation between two people where one person brings up an argument and then the other person, the "opponent" gets up in response to that argument. So in that sense, a rebuttal really makes the debate. Without rebuttals, there wouldn't be a debate because it would just basically be two people standing up and giving speeches, strengthening their side of the resolution, but there would be no clash. So a lot of debaters use the illustration of two ships passing in the night. It's just pitch dark, and there's two ships just passing each other, not actually hitting head on. There's no conflict. There's no clash. I think rebuttals are what make that clash within a resolution. When you listen to an argument presented by your opponent and then respond to that argument. So in that sense, rebuttals are absolutely necessary for you to have a good debate. Yeah, totally. You answered that really well. So yeah, it's definitely, I think, what measures the debate round or what determines it. Because like you said, two ships passing by in the night, if they're just reading cases to each other, there's no conflict. There's nothing that really makes the debate interesting or clash, as you said. So yeah, so on rebuttals, talking more about the technical side of it, how much prep should you spend on your rebuttals? So obviously you have three minutes of prep. Let's say you have your affirmative. How much prep should you spend on your first affirmative rebuttal, second, or your first? So on. So that's an interesting question. I'm going to say that it's completely situational, right? So let's say you're affirmative and it's time for you to get up and present your 1A1AR. It really depends, right? So if you're going against a pretty standard negative and you already have arguments embedded into your mind on exactly how you're going to respond to the negative's case, you don't really need to use any prep at all, right? You can just go ahead and quickly scribble down some notes, maybe write out a few tags on your flow, and you can just get up and present. And then you'll have more time for your 2AR. 1A1AR, obviously it's most strategic just to use all the prep you have because the first negative rebuttal is going to be your only negative rebuttal on negative. But I think when it comes to prep with rebuttals, not only looking at it in round, but I think it's important for you to spend time working on your rebuttals outside of the round. And obviously you're not going to know what every single opponent is going to run in round. But when you're prepping before the tournament season, I think it's important for you to think about the arguments that you're going to go against. And being able to have arguments, tags, applications, all of those things ready to respond to your opponent's arguments, that's going to be absolutely critical for you when you're actually in the tournament season doing rounds. So don't think about it too much for prepping rebuttals as in-round work, but a lot of it has to do with what you do outside of the round as well. Yeah, so you talked a little bit about the negative side and how they should use all of their prep time on their rebuttal. But if I'm aware, you can use some of your prep time under the negative side for prepping your constructive, correct? Absolutely. So again, it's completely up to you. It's usually just personal preference. Typically I don't spend any time on my negative constructive using any prep before my negative constructive just because I'm going to have a lot of that pre-scripted already. And the refutation levels in your negative constructive aren't going to be as much as your five-minute rebuttal. Your five-minute rebuttal is probably not going to be pre-scripted. Right. Six minutes. Sorry, I'm used to deep policy rebuttals now. Your six-minute negative rebuttal probably isn't going to be pre-scripted. It's probably going to require some more prep time. So I always found it strategic to spend my prep time there. But obviously it's up to you. I think, though, personally, it's always good to use all of your prep. I went against the debater at Nationals who did not use any prep during the round. And I talked to him after the round and he said he didn't think he needed any. But I think that comes across as a little bit cocky. And you can always look over your arguments one more time, right? So before your negative rebuttal, I would say always make sure that timer hits zero before you get up in percent. Yeah. So sometimes you practice and I did one practice round using no prep time for my negative speech. Is that ever a good thing to practice not using prep time so you can think on your feet? Yeah. So actually I do that a lot just because I think while it is important to know how to use your prep time, it's also important to know how to speak without using prep time. Because there's going to be times where you need to use a lot of your prep time for that one AR. And when it comes around to your two AR, you're not going to have any prep time left. So I think it's good to practice giving speeches with limited prep time. Maybe like a minute to present the six minute speech. And what that will allow you to do is that will allow you to be able to generate arguments more quickly and kind of on the fly. And that'll be super helpful for you in tournament in round. Oh, that's that's not cool. I'll try doing that more often. So shifting away from prep time a little bit, talking more about organization and structure of rebuttals. How should you organize your rebuttal? The typical general rebuttal, affirmative or negative, it doesn't matter. How should you organize your rebuttal? Sure. So this also is going to come down to personal preference. I don't think there's like one way to structure a rebuttal and there's no like one best way to structure a rebuttal. So last year I started off the year structuring it through like voting issues and main points. So I would just condense the debate or collapse the debate into like three key points that I think all the arguments hinged upon. And then I'll just be like at the start of my rebuttal, I have three points in this rebuttal I want to cover. Give those three points and then for the rest of the speech explain exactly why my side of the resolution upholds these three ideas best. And then in the second half of the season I actually switched to just going line by line. So there was no really organization. I would just look at all the arguments presented by the or by my opponent and then just go line by line and respond to all of them. So it's really you really should just do what what I think you're most comfortable with and what you do the best like what you do the best with. I think there are definitely some people who are better with the line by line and there are some people who are better with the overarching big idea arguments. But I would definitely encourage all debaters to try both experiment with both and just figure out what style works best with them. Okay, I'll get to that a little bit more later. But for now, so let's talk a little bit about intros and intros for rebuttals. How should you begin your rebuttal or should you even begin or have an intro at all? Right, so yes, this is some this is kind of a stylistic thing. I it really depends on the round. I personally like to just get straight into it. And I know a lot of judges if they're experienced judges also like that just because they can kind of see through your rhetoric like you can have a very clever intro, a nice little quote, but really in like the grand scheme of things at the end of the debate, those little intros aren't really going to gain you any points, right? Maybe they'll gain you a little bit of points, but I think it's more important for you to prioritize getting to your arguments. So oftentimes, I will just start the speech by saying, I have four main points I want to get to in this speech, and then just go straight in. That's my personal take on it. Obviously, you do what works best for you if you like to have intros, if you like to have analogies, if you like to have illustrations, all of those things work as well. Just from what I've seen, though, it's best to just get get into it as straight as possible. I also do want to say I know a lot of debaters say at the beginning of the rebuttals. I just want to go down the flow and respond to all my opponent's arguments. That's like the most cliche debate rebuttal intro that you're going to hear. I highly encourage you not to start with that one because judges hear that a thousand times and they're just sick of it, and second, it's just a waste of time. Why would you waste your precious couple seconds explaining to the judge that you're just going to go down the flow when you can just go down the flow and let the judge find out for themselves? Do you think that you should prescript intros, something that you'll use every time? Maybe if it's something creative, you can prescript it? If that's what you want to do, if you do want to have a clever little intro, maybe a story and analogy, definitely you do want to prescript that because there are definitely times where people try to create this intro during the round and they think that it's super funny, but it just doesn't really work out too well. If you do want to have that intro, definitely think about that beforehand. Yeah. For the few LD rounds that I've had, it's kind of interesting just thinking up of random examples that you can think of for imminent domain. I've had some interesting things from people saying that we shouldn't have highways in the first place to someone saying that we need to use imminent domain to take away someone's house in case it explodes. So definitely some interesting things out there that have very clearly been made up on the fly. Right. Exactly. Yeah. So kind of a more interesting question. So if you had to pick one, would great speaking or good argumentation be better in a debate round or a Lincoln Douglas debate round specifically? That's a great question. I don't want to be that person, but I really think it takes both because when you think about it, yes, debate does require arguments. It's good to have great logic, great reasoning, have very powerful arguments, but if you're not able to present those arguments in a way that is convincing and persuasive, I really think that those arguments are negligible. So I think it requires both. Now, obviously, debate is more argumentative heavy. It's not speech. You're not just trying to impress the judge with your rhetoric. So I lean a little bit to the argumentative side, however, a lot of the time rounds do come down to who speaks better. And this is something that I noticed specifically with LD. I think this happens less in TP because LD rounds, especially good LD rounds, are so close when it comes to arguments. Judges really do pick the winner off of who spoke better. So that's why I think it is necessary for you to practice your rhetoric skills. Because when it comes down to the wire, and you and both sides have presented great arguments, that good speaking, those good, that good rhetoric is going to give you the edge. Okay. Yeah. So when it comes down to it, argumentation is really what you should focus in and key in on over speaking. So I don't think there'll be any situation where you have to pick one above the other. Like in my opinion, you should be working on both. But because debate is inherently an argument of sorts between two parties, I think, yes, it does require you to have, to some extent, some good logic, good analysis and good arguments. You can't present your argument if you don't have a way to present it properly. So I totally understand that. So kind of touching on a question that we talked about earlier. So you mentioned line by line and voting issues. So when should you use line by line voting issues, perhaps other styles that you can think of, think about, and how should you use them? Wow. So I'm going to go back to what I said earlier, and I'm going to say, first of all, you do what works best for you. I'm not going to just sit here and say, only do line by line, because some people genuinely don't do well with line by line. I think that line by line voting issues, overarching points, all of these things should be used within your rebuttals. So let me give you an example. If I were to give an overarching point, that overarching point would function also as a voting issue. Because a voting issue is just a main point or a reason why the judge should vote for you. So overarching point is basically a voting issue. And within that voting issue, you should still be addressing your opponent's arguments. So you should still be going line by line and addressing the arguments that your opponent presented. Now you may not specifically be going in order, and you may not specifically be the most organized when it comes to determining, this argument goes with this argument, this argument goes with this argument, but you're still going line by line in the sense that you're still trying to hit all your opponent's arguments, making sure that you're refuting them. And I think that's at the basis of any rebuttal. It doesn't matter what style you use. As long as you get the job done, as long as you're able to respond to the arguments presented by your opponents, that's what matters, not so much on the style or the structure. So I'm going to tell you kind of how I roll with my rebuttals and tell me if you think it's a good idea or a bad idea, or if it's going on to be a good idea. So for my affirmative, what I typically do, my first affirmative rebuttal, what I typically do is I firstly go line by line with whatever I could write down, because sometimes I miss a contention. So I try to go through as much as I can, and then I don't present any voting issues in my first rebuttal for affirmative. And then I just go over main points of the debate. So is that, would that work? Yeah, so that's actually what I do on affirmative as well, because I don't think it's a strategic move to bring up your voting issues in your one AR, because negative still has a speech, and if you just tell the judge what your strongest points are straight off the gun in the one AR, the negative is just going to spend all their time refuting your strongest arguments. So I think the most strategic way to go about doing rebuttals on AF is, I think like you said, making sure you responded to all the negative arguments that they presented in their constructive in the one AR, and then in the two AR, not so much responding to everything that they said in the one in AR, because the one in AR had six minutes of argumentation. In your two AR, you only have three minutes. So not so much as responding to every single argument, but really breaking down the debate into a few key points, voting issues, and then explaining to the judge very precisely exactly why these voting issues matter and why that should warrant an affirmative ballot. And I do want to say, no matter what style you use, you should be using voting issues. You may not call them voting issues, but you should always have three premises or three key ideas that are kind of the backbone of the affirmative or negative and explain exactly why those couple points should get you the win at the end of the debate. I think voting issues are absolutely necessary in any report. Yeah. But I've heard from some people that you should probably use the voting issues and save them for the last rebuttal, is that what you were saying? Yes. Yeah. I don't think it's strategic to bring them up in the very first rebuttal. And LD is easy, because AF only has two rebuttals and NEG only has one rebuttal. So really, you're only holding off on using the rebuttals one speech, which is the first affirmative rebuttal. And really, you should be using that time to respond to the one NC. You shouldn't be trying to just take a step back and look at all the arguments presented, because not many arguments have really been presented at that point. That's very true. So for the negative rebuttal, here's how I typically go about it. So what I do with the negative rebuttal, I go line by line, and then I have something called a preliminary. I'm not sure if that's the right word or anything. But what I do in that little tiny section, I just say something that my opponent miscoded me. And I say, "Oh, that's not the case. I actually said this." Or if my opponent said something that wasn't true or something that they said that was totally and completely out of this debate round that I just wanted to clarify really quickly. And then I move on to my voting issues for negative. That was that sound. So that's something that I kind of did when I was starting off in LD. And I think in the way that I have been taught when I was learning LD is that's a little bit counterproductive in the sense that why are you responding to arguments and then bringing up voting issues? Because voting issues are offensive arguments, but they're also kind of responses to your opponent's argument. So it gets a little bit repetitive, right? You're responding to all your opponent's arguments, and then you're bringing up these key points that you just refuted. So how I structure my NNR is I just structure completely around these voting issues. Maybe how four or five voting issues, now just tell the judge, "In this speech, I have four voting issues." And then, like I said before, within these overarching points, within these overarching voting issues, I'll kind of go line by line and address the arguments that affirmative presented while strengthening my own through these voting issues. And what this does is it avoids repetition, and it allows you to have a very organized speech. It's almost like a constructive, right? You have a couple main points, and you're just going down those main points rather than you just kind of responding to some random arguments first and then getting into those main points. So kind of as we start wrapping up here, what would you think is one good tip or one good thing that we should start working on maybe every day, something that we could do every day, to work on our rebuttal skills if there's anything? Sure. So obviously, practice. Like anything, you have to practice to get good at it. And I think rebuttals are no exception, especially because I think rebuttals are really one of the hardest parts of debating, or at least when you're starting off debating. It's the hardest part to learn because in the beginning, you're struggling filling your time with your rebuttals, right? Yeah. In your one and R, you're just trying to get all six minutes in, not finish while you have three minutes left in the clock. But the more you practice, the better you get. So by the end of the year, I can guarantee you that you're just not going to have enough time. But that comes with practice. So whether it be just giving a rebuttal to your own speech, or maybe getting a club case and responding to that through a rebuttal, or doing practice rounds with your friends, I think these are all great ways to practice your rebuttal skills. And specifically, when you're doing these rebuttal practices, there are a couple things I think you should think about. One, you have to think about the intent of the rebuttal. So you're not just trying to fill time with these rebuttals. You're trying to actually do what the rebuttal is intended to do, which is to respond to your points in an efficient way. So don't worry about filling your time when you're practicing rebuttals. Even if you can't fill your time, that's okay. Just make sure that you're getting out good, crisp, clear arguments out. The second thing you should think about is time management. Because time management, in my opinion, is the hardest part of refuting in debate. You have to be able to make sure that you don't stay on 1.2 long and just ramble. You have to be able to move on while still responding to an argument adequately. So when you're practicing, make sure that you have these things in your mind and you're specifically working to get better at these things. Not just practicing for the sake of practice, not just doing it mindlessly. But you have to make sure that you have to know what you want to work on and then work on those things specifically through your practice. Yeah, very true. I found that doing impromptus really helps in general with all types of speeches and talking out loud. It just helps you think on your feet more. It helps you process these arguments and structures that you can come up with quickly. That's one way that I've really kind of grown to become better at rebuttals. Because the first debate that I had, which was August of this year, I had a 30-second rebuttal where I agreed that we should kill people to take their benefits and use them for the benefit of the community. So I definitely think impromptus has helped me a lot and it's definitely something that should help you. Yes, impromptus are great. I do remember also doing impromptus to practice my rebuttals. The only problem is that while my rebuttals did get better, my impromptus never got better. Like you said earlier, I'm able to give an 8-minute rebuttal without using any prep time. But if I have 5 minutes to give a 5-minute impromptu, I just completely fold. That's funny. So as we start closing, do you have any other tips or suggestions that have come to you about just debate or rebuttals in general? Yeah, and I think this is just really important. I wish I knew this earlier. When you're refuting, I think a lot of people have kind of like a fear. Everyone's scared at tournaments that they're going to go against this argument that they've never faced. Or they're just going to like hit this case they've never heard before, and they're just going to all of a sudden automatically lose. Every argument can be refuted and responded to. And there are ways that you can prepare for those arguments, even if you've never heard of it before. Whether that be practicing, you're just your refutation and your rebuttal skills, you're like practice rounds, just argument generating, or even just like prepping tags and analysis before rounds, before you actually go to a tournament, just getting over that fear of going against this argument you've never faced, and just being able to think about it rationally during the round and then just whip out an argument and just respond to it. The biggest thing is that there is no such thing as an unbeatable argument. Any argument can be refuted. That's the great thing about rebuttals. Those are the perfect opportunities for you to show that. Yeah, definitely. Well, thank you so much for being on the show, Christian. I appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me. Of course. Yeah. All right. I'll see you next time. All right. I'll see you. Thanks for listening to this episode. If you have any comments, suggestions, questions, or just want to keep up to date, you can follow my Instagram @onpointpodcast_. Again, that's onpointpodcast_. Thanks for tuning in, and I'll see you in the next one.