Author: Matt Liu, University of Wyoming Director of Debate Quickdraw posts are snapshot reflections that are usually spurred by observations the WDR staff have while judging at Wyoming tournaments. This quickdraw is about overviews: when you should have them and what should (and shouldn't) be in them. Overviews are often understood to be places where you summarize or re-explain your position for a judge. I want to complicate that! Rather than thinking of overviews as summary, I want you to think about them solely as a place to locate comparative impact calculus. If you have a lay judge, it is a good decision to add a summary of your position above that, but the more you think of overviews as comparative impact calculus, the better. If you don't have a lay judge, you should completely avoid summary. With an experienced judge, you don't need to re-explain your position because they will have understood it when you introduced it in the 1NC. Instead, overviews should be about winning that your impact comes first. Read the complete article below the fold. When should you have an overview? The vast majority of overviews should be impact calc for offense that you are extending. The most common example is a disadvantage (or contention in LD or PF), but this also applies to kritiks, counterplans that have internal net benefits, impact turns, and even topicality. In policy, you should have them for offense you're extending in the block and in the 2NR. In LD, you should have one for the offense you are going for in the NR. In PF, you should have one in your Final Focus. In LD and PF impact calc is often called impact weighing, or it is passed over in favor of "voters," but I think that LDers and PFers that think more in terms of impact weighing are far more successful than ones bogged down by the frame of voters (or often even the V/C debate). Where should the overview be located? Above the offense you are extending. In policy, when you take a DA in the 1NR, you should take it for all 5 minutes and you should have an overview that is your comparative impact calculus. When you give the order you'll say something like: "the workforce shift DA with an overview." That tells the judge which piece of flow paper to grab, and to leave room for an overview. In a final rebuttal (in any event), it should start your speech, because impact calc is the most important part of the debate. In LD and PF I often see debaters put the "voters" at the end of their speech. I think this is backwards for two reasons: first, it tends to result in a lot of inefficient repetition of points that have already been made. Second, this is the most important part of the debate -- it should be a powerful opening your speech. Underviews should always be avoided. What goes in the overview? Impact calc! You'd probably be better off if you entirely mentally replace "overview" with "comparative impact calc" (but "overview" is still the language you should use with the judge, especially when you give a roadmap, because that's the language judges understand). So what does comparative impact calculus mean? The first way you usually learn to do impact calc is "magnitude, timeframe, probability." These are decent starter tools, but the gold standard of impact calculus is "turns case" args - using your impact to turn the aff or takeout aff solvency. I was taught "you should be able to win the DA from the impact calc even if you don't get to the case debate" (to be clear, you should always get to the case debate). The first line of every 1NR and 2NR overview for a DA should be: "The disad outweighs and turns the case, X reasons. (1) ..." It should always be a numbered list and the first argument should always be a quick reference to your external impact (because we always put our external offense first!). But the fun starts after that, when you get to make interactive arguments about how your impact disrupts their impact. Here's an example from an article we published on rethinking the value /criterion debate in LD: Almost every debate camp has an "impact calc tournament." Debaters draft or are assigned various impacts and have to debate just the impact calc portion of a debate. I'll let you in on a secret: the debater who focuses on how the impacts interact always wins the tournament. Here are some classic examples:
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