By: Alex Alifimoff, Stanford University 2015
There are a number of schools of thought on how to give proper APDA rebuttals. Being an excellent rebuttalist is a skill that most debaters work most of their careers to perfect, yet never fully achieve. I am certainly not an exception to this rule, and the style that I’m going to detail is very popular on APDA, but definitely not the only way to give a great rebuttal.
A rebuttal should paint a picture for your judge on why your team has won the debate. You should try to simplify the round as much as possible, leading your judge, like a horse to water, to an RFD that results in your victory. A rebuttal should concentrate solely on the important arguments in the round, mostly disregarding arguments that you think matter very little when weighed against the more central arguments in the round.
Begin your rebuttal by asking 2-4 questions. Each question should be polarized, meaning that they should tend to be Yes/No questions or Us/Them questions. Outline all of your questions at the start of your speech, and then ask and answer them individually.
Picking the right questions
Half of a rebuttal is making sure that you ask the right questions. Let’s say you were debating whether or not it would be good to allow the police to use heat detection to examine homes without a search warrant. Your first question might be: “Does this policy violate rights?“. Your second might be “Even if this policy doesn’t violate rights, is it socially beneficial?” You want to aim for questions that isolate independent parts of the debate. My first question is completely separate from the second. I can win one without winning the other. This allows you to maximize the amount of independent offense you have.
You also want questions that you can “lose” without losing the round. Let’s say you argue that this policy violates rights, but your judge disagrees. Maybe the policy doesn’t violate rights — but that’s not a reason to vote for the other team, that’s just a reason not to vote for you. Now, your judge can defer to the second question about social utility and you can still win the round, even though you lost the first question. Pick questions that aren’t losers if you have the luxury to do so.
However, since this is debate, there will be many times where you will be in a situation where you will have to ask questions where you could lose the round if the judge doesn’t agree with you. If you think that there is an area where you are definitely losing the round, you need to make sure you address that area of the debate in rebuttal so that you don’t lose! Make sure take out their major areas of offense by picking questions specific to their offense. This is the rebuttal part of the rebuttal. Let’s say your opponents argued that this policy allows the police to catch more criminals. You might add a third question to your rebuttal: “Does this policy really help the police stop more crime?”
Answering the questions
Now that you’ve picked the right questions, you just need to convince your judge that you’re right! Hopefully you’ve been debating well throughout the rest of the round, and this will be easy.
Make sure you explain the original argument you made briefly, then explain the responses your opponents made to those arguments and why those responses are insufficient/wrong. Also, if you’re responding to a new argument in MO, to preempt any potential Points of Order, make sure you say something like, “Responding to the new argument MO makes” right before you respond to the argument.
Here’s the key: after you’ve explained why you’re right, you need to explain why answering this question in particular means that you’ve won the round. For example, let’s say that you asked “Does this policy violate rights?” After you’ve explained why this policy clearly violates rights, you need to explain why a rights violation means that you’ve won the round. This is likely as simple as saying, “The government isn’t allowed to create policies that violate rights, regardless of any social benefits”, in the case of a rights violation. For other topic areas, i.e. social benefits, you need to explain why your specific social benefits are more important to the actor than your opponents social benefits. If you were debating whether Greece ought exit the Eurozone, you might explain here why economic benefits are more important to Greece at the moment than any benefits from political unity that you opponents might be winning on.
If you’re answering a defensive question (a question where you’re trying to beat your opponent’s offense), you should try to win comparatively. Come up with arguments (earlier in the round, obviously) that give you offense in their impact areas. For example, if they’re arguing that this policy helps police catch more criminals, try to find a reason that this might actually make it harder for police to catch more criminals. But, if you weren’t capable of coming up with any offense in this area (and even if you were), you should make sure you explain at the end of defensive questions why, even if you lose this question, you’re not going to lose the round. Explain why your opponents impacts aren’t important.
There are a lot of schools of thought on how to give proper rebuttals! Try and find something that works for you, but remember that you’re supposed to be presenting the big picture of the round. Don’t get caught up in specifics or unimportant arguments, even if you’re really ahead on the flow on them!
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