Team Policy is Broken, Part 3: Division of Labor
This is part 3 in a series. Catch up:
Part 1: Volleys
Part 2: Constructives
Block > 1NC
The first negative constructive is 8 minutes. It’s followed by a 13-minute negative block. So if you run all your arguments in the 1NC, you have two possible outcomes.
Shell and Extend. You don’t fully explain all your arguments in the 1NC. Instead, you just tell the judge what they’re going to be. You offer tags like trailers for an upcoming movie. The 2AC responds to the half-formed arguments, creating confusion and probably wasting time. The negative block fully explains them and presents the necessary evidence. So we don’t have fully-presented negative arguments until the round is more than half over. That’s bad for everyone. We’ve effectively turned most of the debate into a “practice run.”
Dead Air. If you do everything you need to fully present the arguments in the 1NC, you now face a terrible challenge: spend more time defending the arguments than you spent presenting them in the first place. That forces you to drag the arguments out, rehash things within the volley, or simply run out of things to say before your speech is over.
Neither option is acceptable to a skilled negative team.
Division of Labor
Decades of trial and error have consistently supported the practice of Division of Labor, in which the negative splits their arguments between the two constructives. There are many ways to handle that; some are better than others. But even the weakest division is better than none at all. Division means you can present your arguments in their entirety in the first speech that mentions them, and you don’t have to worry about dead air or rehashing in the negative block.
Division of labor is the only viable negative option.
All team policy debaters should practice division of labor. But that doesn’t mean it’s a neat fix. Far from it. In our next post, we’ll show why division of labor is so harmful to back-and-forth rejoinder.
Up next: the insane math of team debate.