Up until this point in our discussion of debate, we have just been using logic and common sense as a way to develop warrants to support our claims or our arguments. So when we're thinking about anything from whether pizza is the best food ever, to whether bananas are better than oranges, or to more important questions like whether colleges should use standardized tests in their admissions decisions, we've just been coming up with arguments on the spot. Obviously, in a real debate, the only way to evaluate two opposing claims at the end of the day is to have some sort of evidence, some sort of studies to back up what you are saying to differentiate whose claim is actually better.
Because I promise you that at your age, you are not an expert at anything in any field. And so what we need to do is admit humility in the face of these questions and present evidence from people who are a lot smarter than ourselves, who have done a lot more research. as a way to show that our claims actually have robust support. That support can take a lot of forms, but at the end of the day, evidence is a key way to victory in debate.
So with that, let's take a look at exactly what the role of evidence is within a debate round. Like I just mentioned in this overview, the ultimate goal of evidence is about that warrant part of argumentation. If you remember the structure of any sort of argument, which is claim, warrant, and impact, the role of evidence...
is to provide robust warrants, to provide very good warrants, to provide a good foundation for your warrants by showing that qualified experts actually agree with your claim, and perhaps more importantly, are providing relevant data, statistics, empirical examples, historical effects, case studies, testimonies that support your point. Evidence can take a lot of different forms in terms of what the evidence itself actually says, but at the end of the day, all evidence is working to provide a robust warrant to back up your point. And so in a debate round, what makes evidence a little bit different than what you would see in, say, an oratory speech or just what you would imagine a debate to be is that you actually read large chunks of the evidence out loud. And debaters call this a card, right? You actually present the full article.
And way back in the day, originally, when people had to just cut out clips from a newspaper and tape it onto note cards. That's where the term card came from. Today, what happens is you present the article, you read big sections of that article.
And this is very different than what you normally see in a speech where people typically just paraphrase evidence. You know, they'll say, and according to, you know, Dr. Tombasa, and then they will summarize something that Dr. Tombasa said in his evidence, or They will paraphrase or they will quote a very short statistic or maybe a phrase from the evidence. But in a debate round, because evidence is so important to evaluate core questions in any sort of discussion or debate, you are not paraphrasing and you're not summarizing.
Instead, what you're doing is you're actually presenting the full article, reading chunks of it, as a way to present a more nuanced and a deep approach to our engagement with the evidence. So. Let me show you what this looks like. This is an example of a card, okay?
And this was on a debate topic over whether or not the United States federal government should be reforming the education system in the United States. Now, you can see here that this was a negative piece of evidence that was ultimately making the defensive argument that federal education reform ultimately doesn't work. There always ends up being too much bureaucracy, and so it all ultimately fails. our students.
It never ultimately is successful. Let's take a look at the different aspects of this card. So first you can see here the article or what's referred to as the card text. And so this is copy and pasted from the website, from the URL, this nationalaffairs.com website.
This is the article itself, word for word. Nothing is omitted. Nothing is deleted.
Debaters are not allowed to delete stuff in the middle and just include the quotes they want. This is the entire article or at least an entire section of the article and you can see the important lines are are underlined all right so basically what this what this debater did is he went through and he underlined anything that might potentially be relevant and then after that he highlighted just the words that he would end up reading with in the debate round because obviously if you were to try to read a full article in the debate round that would take forever and no one has the attention span for that so what you need to do is just highlight the key ideas, but you can still see that even just reading those highlighted sentences here on this card, that is still a longer quotation than what you would probably be used to in most types of speeches that you would just see, you know, in any sort of other situation. But a debate, right, puts as one of its core foundational tenets that evidence is an important way to evaluate questions and that the only way to resolve those questions is through strong evidence.
Next, you can see right above this is the citation. So who wrote this evidence? Some guy named Frederick Hess. You can see the qualifications are there. The director of education policy at the American Enterprise Institute.
Seems pretty legitimate to be talking about education questions, right? And then you can see the date, fall 2013. After that, you can see there is a longer form of citation, similar to what you'd probably have at the end of an essay where you'd have a work cited or bibliography. And then you can see the question, And then finally, at the very top, you have the tag, which is the explanation of the argument that the evidence makes. This is in your own words. So that bolded sentence at the top here that this top arrow that says tag is pointing to, that is written in this debater's own words.
He is not summarizing anything from the actual card text. And the reason he puts that there is so that everybody in the audience can understand the claim that the evidence is going to make. So you'll see that ultimately. reading a card is very similar to the claim warrant impact structure. The difference is that instead of your warrant just being logical analysis, the warrant is this middle part here, the article or card text, which provides that warrant for you through expert analysis.
So how do you read a card? This is really important, right? If you had one of those pieces of paper in your hand, just like what we just saw, how do you go about reading that in a debate round?
So first... You read the tag. So you'll summarize the argument or the evidence in your own words. It's really important to make eye contact with the audience and to have more vocal emphasis. It's very important that vocally you are communicating, hey, this is me talking, I'm not just reading off a piece of paper.
Even if you have the tag pre-written out like most debaters do, you need to be familiar with it so that you can look up and indicate to the entire audience, hey, this is in my own words. The worst thing to do is if you read the tag and the evidence itself in the exact same vocal pattern and vocal tone, you have no differentiation, because then it'll be very, very hard for an audience to appreciate whether or not, hey, is he reading or she reading actual evidence, or are they talking in their own words right now? That can be very confusing unless you vary your tone.
Next, read the citation, and the format for this is always This evidence comes from, insert the author name, who is, insert the qualifications, on, and then insert the date that the evidence was published. Typically, year is good enough. If it's published from 2020, then you can get to the specific month and date, right? So if your evidence was from 2018, you could just say, which comes from 2018. If your evidence was published, you know, just a few days ago, you could say on June 24th.
Third, you read the highlighted words of the evidence. So look at the flow here, right? You tell the audience what they're about to hear and what the argument of the evidence is. Next, you say this evidence comes from to make it clear that you're about to read evidence. And then third, you read the evidence itself.
It's really important that you don't over-highlight the evidence. You do not want to be reading card text for over 20 seconds. It just becomes way too easy to tune out for the audience.
It'll be really boring, and you won't really get much bang for your buck. Conversely, you don't want to under-highlight. You don't want to have only like five words highlighted. That obviously wouldn't be very robust. And fourth, after you read the highlighted words of the evidence, then you want to summarize the argument of your evidence and why it matters, right?
So typically this takes the form of, right, this evidence proves that and explain what it just proved. And then you would say this means, and then you explain what the impact of the argument ultimately is. So notice here, if you follow this structure of tag, citation, evidence, and then the summarization why it matters, you're doing the exact same claim warrant impact structure that we've been talking about.
It's just a deeper form of that because you actually read evidence to back up your warrant as opposed to just making up a warrant and saying that logically it probably makes sense. So let's take a look at what this looks like, okay? So I'm going to read this card out loud. You should follow along. to make sure that you're understanding exactly what I'm doing.
And notice especially how I try to change my vocal intonation between the tag and the citation, and then when I transition to the evidence itself. So the way you'd go about doing this is something along the lines of federal education reform devolves into bureaucracy, which ultimately fails our students. This evidence comes from Frederick Hess, Director of Education Policy at the American Enterprise Institute in fall of 2013. He writes, Putting new policies into practice involved tackling 14,000 school districts, many of whom view reformers with hostility.
Earlier reform efforts failed. Most officials are neither inclined nor equipped to turn reforms into reality. Lethargy and foot-dragging result in layers of mandates and bureaucracy. This evidence clearly shows that whenever policymakers have tried to reform federal education, it always devolves into layers of mandates and bureaucracy that means that nothing is actually fixed when it comes to our education.
That means that the affirmative team's attempt to reform education in the United States is just going to be another failure, which means it is a bad policy, and thus we shouldn't pass it. So hopefully you got a feeling for how a card is read. Notice that I just summarized that on the spot.
I just thought of, okay, what did I just read? Let me explain this out loud again and kind of explain the ultimate impact here. But hopefully that made sense. And so part of your homework tonight is going to be reading a card from one of these two files.
I have standardized tests, the affirmative cards, or standardized tests, the negative cards posted. So whatever side of that debate you're more interested in, right? If you think standardized tests are good, then you should go for the negative cards. If you think standardized tests are bad, then go for the affirmative cards, right? And so practice reading cards out loud just to get familiar with reading the tag, reading the citation, reading the actual evidence text, and then summarizing on the spot.
And be sure to vary your pace and tone for the tag and cite versus the card text itself like I just showed you. Next, let's talk about evaluating evidence. All right. So you read, let's say in this situation, you stand up, you read a card saying standardized test or a bad measure of student achievement.
Colleges shouldn't use them. The other, your opponent stands up and says, no, my opponent is wrong. Standardized tests are a great measure of student achievement, and here's some evidence. What do you do then?
So now you need to be able to think on the spot of some reasons why your evidence should be preferred over your opponent's evidence. And so this brings us to a discussion of what the most important qualities of strong evidence really are. So.
First is a credible author and publication. And so what you should be thinking here is, is the author actually qualified to discuss the topic that is being discussed? So, for instance, in that last piece of evidence from Frederick Hess, he seemed to be the director of an education policy institute.
That seems pretty qualified. Now, you can imagine that if somebody was writing about federal education reform who, say, worked in the tech industry, Would a Apple engineer be qualified to really know the nuances of education policy in the United States? Probably not.
Also, you got to think about the publication itself. Is the publication credible and qualified? Not all publications are made equal. And sometimes their names can be deceiving. For instance, on our debate topic about immigration two years ago, there was a organization called the Center for Immigration Studies.
Now, when you just hear that Center for Immigration Studies, that sounds pretty legitimate, right? It sounds like they're going to be a think tank research institute that is going to specialize in producing research and studies on immigration questions. It turns out it was funded by hate groups that are labeled by the U.S. government as hate groups and backed by white supremacists.
So all of a sudden, whenever a team would read the Center for Immigration Center, we would stand up and ask, you know. wait a second, this is a group that is backed by white supremacists and has been labeled by the government as a hate group. Why should we evaluate this evidence? So you always want to be aware of that, okay?
Second, you want to make sure that your evidence itself is actually supporting your claims, right? Does the evidence, does the article itself, the lines of the evidence actually make the claim that you want to make, right? If you say standardized tests should not be used in college admissions decisions.
and your warrant is that they are a bad metric of student achievement, it would be really, really nice if your evidence not only says that standardized tests are a bad metric of student achievement, but that it also makes the ultimate claim that you want to make, which is that standardized tests should not be used. You can imagine an article that says standardized tests aren't a great metric of student achievement, which is kind of the argument you want to make, but then later in the article says, but they still serve an important role. That would not be ideal. So ideally, it comes to the exact conclusion that you want.
Now, it's not the end of the world if it just provides statistics and you have to do some extrapolating or some explaining to help the judge understand why that evidence proves your argument. But it's much more ideal if it just directly states that argument that you want to make. Third, you want to make sure it has strong warrants.
And this is actually probably more important than the strong claim point I just went over. All right. You do not just want a card that says colleges shouldn't use standardized tests and provides no explanation of why that's true.
The best types of warrants articulate how and or why the stated claim is true and ideally has statistics, peer reviewed studies, empirical examples, et cetera, to back it up. OK, strong warrants can can win rounds. I mean.
Just think about it. There's a lot of levels of warranting going on within this lecture, right? Not only are you reading evidence to back up the warrant that you want to make, you want to make sure that your evidence itself has a warrant to back up the point that you're using it for. A great example of this, I saw this at the state tournament in a debate over whether or not the United States should let in more high-skilled immigrants into the United States.
So these are people who are going to be doctors, lawyers, engineers, computer scientists, etc. And one team was making the claim that high-wage immigrants, or high-skilled immigrants, I should say, when they come to the United States, they end up lowering wages for American workers because these companies, right, have to pay more for American citizens so they can pay less for these foreign workers, and that's bad for American citizens, right? It lowers wages across the board, which is bad for hardworking American citizens.
The other team said, actually, no, that's not true. High-skilled immigrants are really good. good for the economy, and they end up generating a lot of economic growth and innovation, and their studies that say that they lower wages are wrong.
And I saw a brilliant cross-examination where one of the speakers, arguing that high-skilled immigrants do not lower wages, started asking about the other team's evidence and studies. And she asked the other team, she said, did your studies, like, what was the methodology of your studies? And the other team didn't know, all right?
And she said, wait, you don't even know what factors they took into consideration when determining how high-skilled immigrants affect wages in the U.S.? And the other team said, well, no, but our evidence still says that they hurt wages. And then the speaker, she asked, did your study take into account the age and number of years that these high-skilled immigrants had been working in this industry?
Did they factor those factors into the study? All right, age and number of years that they've been working there. And the other team said, we don't know.
And then the speaker said, our evidence says that most studies do not take into consideration the age of high-skilled immigrants and the number of years they've been working in their industry and that the reason their wages are often lower is just because they are just starting off in their career and not because they get paid less than other American workers. At the end of the day, anybody in their first or second or third year at a company or in their career is going to have a lower wage than other people who are 20, 30 years into their career. So that was a long-winded way of saying that knowing the warrants of your evidence and being able to back up why your statistics make the claim that they do or showing that there were peer-reviewed studies or showing that there are examples that your evidence is talking about, really, really, really great way to win a debate.
After that moment in the debate, it became clear to me, right, that the team that I just described was just so far ahead on that question that I didn't believe any of the other team's arguments that high-skilled immigrants lower wages because they never had a good response to that. Finally is recency. Okay, so how recent or outdated is the article? Recency can certainly be important.
I typically see debaters put a little bit too much emphasis on recency, right? You can imagine that encounter I just described above about the high-skilled immigrant debate. If one piece of evidence came six months after the other, does that disinvalidate all of the explanation I just gave?
No, absolutely not, right? If the methodology still isn't taking into account those factors that I just described, it's still not going to be a good study, even if it came six months down the road. But let's reverse it and talk about when recency becomes really important. Let's say we're discussing the best way to combat coronavirus or to at least stem the tide of coronavirus. If I were to present you evidence in February that says that masks aren't needed and aren't very effective in stopping the spread, and then somebody else stands up and reads evidence from, and so that first evidence was from February, and then somebody else stands up and reads evidence.
from yesterday saying that masks aren't incredibly important in our strategy to fight coronavirus, well, recency is probably going to be really important in that debate because we're finding out new stuff every single day about the coronavirus. And so our knowledge about the coronavirus is so much better today than it was five months ago or four months ago. In addition, right, there's a point at which an article becomes probably too old.
If an article is from the 1990s. It's probably not going to be very relevant. Maybe it's making good points, but at that point, you can hopefully find evidence from much more recently that makes the same claim.
Ideally, you're kind of 2010 on. That's the ideal. Once you're past 2015, now you're in a really good spot. Once you're in 2018, 2019, or 2020, now you're incredibly recent.
So let's take a look at this evidence, and you should be asking yourself, Is this good evidence based on those four standards that you just wrote down in your notes? So this evidence is making the claim that attempts to reform some aspect of our court system, right, plea bargaining, are ineffective. Now the beauty of this is you don't really even need to understand what plea bargaining is to be able to answer the question of whether or not the evidence is good.
So take a moment. I recommend pausing this video, looking over the citation, looking over... the qualifications of the author, looking over the date, looking over the evidence itself and what's highlighted, and seeing whether or not it checks all the boxes for what is good evidence.
So pause the video now, and then I'll walk you through how I would look at this. Okay, hopefully you took a stab at this on your own. I think it's really important to try to practice this on the spot as a way to test whether or not you're getting the points that I'm making.
So this evidence. Let's start with the author qualifications. This guy, Stephen, he seems very qualified.
He's a professor of law at NYU. When talking about the court and justice system, a professor of law is a pretty qualified person. Next, you can see that he is writing in June 1992. That's not great.
1992 is the year I was born, and so that's when you know that it's a little bit dated. So that's not ideal. But maybe, maybe, maybe the evidence is making really good claims.
Maybe it has really good analysis. So maybe it'll still be worthwhile. Let's take a look. The evidence says reform of the bargaining process only nibbles at the edges of the problem. Reforms have little impact on the inefficiencies and injustices of the American plea bargaining system.
So certainly I got to give it to this evidence. It's directly making the claim the author wants or the debater wants. You can see here the tag says attempts to reform plea bargaining are ineffective, and the evidence very clearly says that attempts to reform plea bargaining have little impact on the inefficiencies and injustices of the American system.
So it's certainly supporting the claim, and it has the direct and strong and relevant claim here, so it checks that box. But it has no warrant. It doesn't provide an explanation of why reform never works, of why it always devolves into efficiency, and so it's not great evidence. You can imagine a cross-examination on this where the other debater, the opponent, asks, your evidence says that reform never works. Why?
And the debater would have to just kind of scratch their head and say, I don't know, but our evidence very clearly says this, and this person is qualified. He's a professor of law, so it must be true. So you can see here, this checks two of the boxes.
It certainly is evidence that is qualified, and it's evidence that supports the direct claim that the debater is trying to make. but it is outdated and it doesn't have warrants. Maybe perhaps in this article there are good warrants. In fact, I'm almost sure that there probably are, but they're not highlighted and they're not read, and thus they aren't important. Let's take a look at this final piece of evidence to end off this lecture.
So this evidence is trying to make the claim that nuclear power production is safe and saves thousands of lives by avoiding fossil fuels. So this is nuclear power for energy production, right? And the fear is whether or not... nuclear power could melt down, create a Chernobyl-like incident. And so this evidence is going to say no.
So same thing, pause the video, go through those four criteria of whether or not an evidence is strong, ask yourself, does it fulfill all four of those components, and then unpause the video, and I'll go through it myself. So you can pause now. All right, hopefully you took a stab at this.
Let's take a look. Let's start off with the authors. These two authors seem incredibly qualified, right?
They are nuclear science professors. When we're talking about questions of nuclear power production, a nuclear science professor is a pretty darn qualified person to be speaking on that issue. Next, let's look at the recency of the evidence, 2015. You know, it's not hot off the press in terms of its recency, but it doesn't feel particularly outdated either.
Right. 2015, that's pretty solid that that should still be in consideration. So I feel pretty good about that.
Now, let's start taking a look at the actual evidence itself. Let's read through it. So it says Swedish nuclear power production has presented 60,000 deaths compared to if fossil base alternatives were used. So right there we can see, good, this is making a direct claim to back up the point the debater is trying to make. Let's see if it has good warrants.
If used to replace coal production, the individual Swedish reactors have the potential of preventing 318 deaths per year for the rest of their operational life. The safety record of nuclear power is exceptional. The high level of concern about safety stems from misinformation. There have been no accidents resulting in an impact on the environment or people in the history of Swedish nuclear power. So I think this passes the sniff test because you can see here it's an empirical example.
It is analyzing the actual real effects that Swedish nuclear power had on Sweden. And through this statistical analysis comes to the conclusion that many deaths each year were prevented because they were not using fossil-based fuels which pollute the environment. And so it has direct statistics of a real event that happened of Swedish nuclear power production, and it directly makes the claims that you want to make, that they are safe, that they are saving lives, that they're not dangerous, and that any of the reasons why people are concerned about the safety stems ultimately from misinformation, because there have been zero accidents. So overall, I think this is really good evidence, and certainly better evidence than the last one we saw, because it fulfills those four criteria that we were just talking about.
So hopefully, at the end of this discussion, you have a better sense of how evidence is used in a debate, how evidence is presented as well in terms of that card format, how to read a card, and how to evaluate a card and evidence. Those are foundational skills, as we'll see, and many debates are lost and won based on whether or not a debater can successfully and persuasively prove that their evidence is superior to their opponent's evidence. and thus that their warrants supporting their claims are better and should be preferred