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Team Policy is Broken, Part 2: Constructives


Debaters should be encouraged to present all their arguments immediately so we can spend the entire debate arguing them. In principle, a Constructive speech is one in which a side introduces their new arguments.

The 1AC works that way. It’s typically fully scripted and presents all aspects of affirmative advocacy - as it should. It’s disingenuous to call the subsequent affirmative speech a constructive. If it were actually used as a constructive, affirmatives would invite a host of justifiable spec arguments.


A second affirmative constructive is, quite simply, a fundamentally bad idea.


It’s so bad that no one in any mainstream theory ecosystem treats it like a constructive. It is a 2AC in name only. For all intents and purposes, it’s just a long rebuttal that is awkwardly positioned before the negative block.

There really isn’t a good reason to have more than one constructive per side. The simplest way to fix this would be to merge them together into longer speeches. But on negative, the issue is a bit more complicated - because we have to contend with the block.


Up next: Division of Labor.


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