imagine a riveting debate with your friend over whether pc or console gaming is superior classic debate right your friend is a defender of pc gaming and he's vehemently insisting that pcs are superior because of their stronger performance he says that they can maintain higher frame frame rates they have higher processing power and they can have consistent upgrades unlike consoles meanwhile you're insisting that the convenience of consoles the fact that they're cheaper easier to set up made to play games makes them superior to pcs so both of you are doing fine refutation throughout the debate against each other's arguments both of you are substantiating your claims with credible evidence both of you are flowing excellently how could a judge then determine which side has won the debate at the end of the day how should the judge know whether performance or convenience is more important in this debate well the answer is that the debaters need to tell the judge which values are more important and so the art of explaining which values or impacts are more important than others in a debate round is called framing and it's a skill i want to focus on in this short instructional video you can see here in this opening image the the part of this image i really want you to focus on is the scale in the statue's hand because that's the best way to think about framing it's about making it clear to the judge which argument's way more than others which ones are more significant and which one should the judge care most about all arguments until you do this type of analysis of framing will feel as if they're equal unless you do the explicit work to explain why one is more important than another so let's hop on in another way to think about framing it's ultimately about helping the judge to understand which arguments are the most important and you want the judge to realize that debate is not a democracy not every argument has equal weight some are more important than others but if a debater is just going down a list of arguments and going back and forth with refutations and counter refutations the judge will get lost they won't understand which arguments are the most important and so yes argumentation and refutation are the core skills of debate but if a direct refutation of your opponent's argument is all that's happening then a debate round will become very confusing in that type of situation it will be like trying to play chess where every piece was disguised so that you wouldn't know which pieces are merely pawns and which pieces are bishops or queens and so your job as the debater is to make the judge realize that some arguments in a debate are just like pawns and that some are much more important the proverbial queens of the debate round and so you need to help the judge understand which pieces are more important than others this is usually done in an overview before you go to the line by line argumentation and refutation so the overview typically happens well it definitionally happens at the beginning of a speech so in those opening 20 to 30 seconds you would explain what the most important argument is in the debate round and why it's more important than your opponent's arguments and then you would get to the you know my opponent's first argument is x but this is wrong because that type of line by line argumentation as it's called now here are the two things you have to do for framing to be successful first you need to explain what is the most important argument in the round and that's typically your best offense and second you need to explain why that argument is more important than your opponent's best argument so their best offense and it is this comparative element that makes framing good uh if all you're doing is just describing a really big piece of offense that you have that that's basic you should already be doing that in your argumentation and refutation in fact i've explicitly tried to push you to do that by incorporating impacting as an important component as a necessary component of good argumentation and good refutation what makes impacting different than framing is that framing is comparative it's explaining why your most important argument is ultimately more important than your opponent's best argument it gives the judge a way to think about the round as a whole and what is ultimately most important this is very useful because this means that even if your opponent wins a certain argument here let's go back to the pc verse console example now obviously in this debate you and your opponent might have very different values uh you as the console individual are defending convenience and easiness of access while your opponent's value seems to be centered around performance and try to think about this debate why might convenience be more important than performance imagine if you were to stand up and try to frame this for the judge and you're going to try to explain why ultimately convenience is the most important argument in the round and it's more important than a pc which could have better performance pause the video and think about it okay now now i recommend you i recommend you try it vice versa where you think about if i was on the other side of the debate and i was trying to defend why performance is more important than convenience for gaming what argument would you make then again i recommend you pause it and think about it so notice the type of thinking that you had to do if you can communicate that effectively to the judge and to the audience it will really dramatically put you ahead of your opponent because in that situation let's go back you're the console debater if you if your opponent persuades the judge that yes pcs have better performance let's say he wins that part of the debate all right he's one that pcs definitively have better performance than consoles well if you've won the framing debate and you've explained why convenience is more important than performance then you can still win the round it doesn't matter whether they win performance because you've proven that convenience is more important so what does framing look like in this debate let's take a look at an example okay so here's what framing might look like in this pc versus console debate if you're trying to provide an explanation for why convenience is more important video games are about having a fun social experience so when deciding whether consoles or pcs are better for gaming convenience is the most important issue because the ease of access makes it so that the greatest number of people can play games having a higher frame rate or superior graphics ultimately doesn't matter if not as many people get to enjoy that game with you so whichever system is cheapest and has the lowest barriers to entry is clearly the best one and it's obvious that consoles are dramatically more accessible and convenient than pcs they don't require incredibly expensive computers they don't require a high technical knowledge to be able to run an upgrade and they require almost no setup in order to start gaming it ultimately doesn't matter if the pc has better performance because convenience is the best way to ensure that video games are accessible to as many people as possible so after doing this type of framing hopefully you see the debate becomes a lot more straightforward it becomes clear which arguments matter and which ones are not as important and it directly critiques the pc debater's main argument by conveying that the value of convenience matters more than the value of performance and that's why framing is one of the most important skills that a debater needs to master in fact one of the most immediate distinguishing factors between a novice debater and an experienced varsity debater is that the experienced debater does framing throughout the debate whereas a novice solely sticks to trying to refute specific line-by-line arguments and just gets lost in the weeds they lose sight of the bigger questions of the debate round if you're not doing this big picture framing then you're ultimately going to make the judge's job incredibly difficult because they're going to have to sit there and try to calculate which arguments they think are more important and guess what that will lead to some frustrating decisions because what if the way they think about the questions ends up being different than the way you want them to think about the questions well the only way to guarantee that they think about the debate and the arguments in the way that you want them to is you have to make that framing explicit you have to walk them through step by step exactly how they should be thinking about the round and how they should be thinking about the argument so hopefully this is a nice little introduction to framing we're obviously going to be practicing this throughout the rest of the semester and getting uh into more specific types of framing when we get to policy debate but for now hopefully the big takeaway we can get here is to push you to try to incorporate short overviews into your speeches that really try to frame what the most important arguments are in the round and why they are more important than your opponent's arguments this is about being comparative hopefully this helped if you have any questions feel free to let me know