What a Good Final Rebuttal Looks Like
We’ve all had those rounds against great debaters who we expect to crush us, but as the round unfolds it’s far more competitive than you expected. After a couple of rebuttals, you feel the round may even be in your hands. But then, the opponent gets up to give their final rebuttal and it changes the course of the round so much so that you have no hope of recovering it. While most debaters will tell you the round is decided before the 1AR, many times a stellar last rebuttal changes the ballot. But how do these top-notch speakers deliver such great speeches when it matters most. How do they figure out what needs to be said, not said, in what order, and how much time should be spent saying it? That’s what we’ll explore in this post. Note: I won’t be touching on the 1AR or 1NR as their roles within a policy round are too different from the 2NC and 2AR, so we’ll just focus on the last two.
The first element of a solid rebuttal is identifying the crux. The crux is the central idea or conflict the round boils down to. Your goal in this time is to analyze all the arguments in the round and identify the question they all link back to. The best way to identify the crux of around is to look at it from a net benefits perspective and given the argumentation, find the question that determines if the aff plan is net beneficial or detrimental. The crux could be whether a link used by the neg to support their argumentation is valid, it could be an issue of ideals like pragmatism vs idealism, it could be about identifying a premise that makes or breaks the affirmative case, it could be about a burden that absolutely must be true for net benefits to be upheld. Whatever the crux is, you want to find it and explain it to your judge in the most articulate and simplistic terms possible in this time. Now that your judge knows what the deciding issue of the round is, you can structure all your remaining argumentation to link back to it for maximum impact.
The second element of a great rebuttal is impact calculus. Many debaters think this means making a disadvantage look as scary as possible or using the most colorful hypotheticals they can find. But that’s not really what it’s about. Impact calculus is the art of weighing arguments and their relative importance then presenting that analysis to the judge. Impact calculus takes the end result of each line of argumentation and shows why one side ultimately wins. As the name suggests this step of the rebuttal is about calculating the importance of each argument’s “impact” on the real world. Where does this analysis belong in your rebuttal though? If you ask me, it belongs in the final 2-2:30 minutes of your speech in your voting issues. Your voting issues should be your offensive arguments that are most central to the crux of the debate. For each given argument, you’ll boil them down in one subpoint, then contrast with impact calculus in the other. This isn’t a one-size-fits-all formula of course, but it’s the approach that works for many debaters. You know what the goal of impact calculus is now, and where it belongs in a final rebuttal. But what does the rhetoric of impact calculus look like? Good impact calculus-centered voting issues should be able to be copy-pasted straight onto the judge’s RFD. Meaning, if your impact calculus was typed out, it should read like a well-articulated RFD from a net benefits judge who was examining the real-world impacts of each argument presented in the round. This gives you the most airtight analysis possible and leaves the least room available for your judge to mishear you, as you’ve literally given them everything they need to fill out their ballot.
The final element of a high-tier rebuttal is time management. How much time should be devoted to each class of argumentation? Glad you asked. There’s more than one way to divvy up arguments and there’s no objectively correct way either, but there are plenty of ways to do it poorly. Here are some general rules of thumb to follow:
1. Devote 30-60 seconds to identifying the crux. This provides a frame of mind for both you and your judge to work off of. If you adequately persuade your judge of this and the neg fails to adapt or catch on, you’ve likely won.
2. Spend 90-120 seconds tying up any loose ends in your opponents’ offensive arguments with direct refutation. Don’t go overboard here, use your word your economy and address only the points that poke a viable hole in your case or have a substantial impact.
3. Spend your remaining time on voting issues. These are the 2-3 offensive arguments that win you the round based upon the crux (which should be founded in net benefits). I liked to devote the first subpoint of each voting issue to establishing why the argument stands, then in the second subpoint go into impact calculus and examine the argument’s importance to the judge’s RFD relative to Neg's argumentation.
And there you have three elements of a high-level rebuttal. After some repetition, giving a crisp rebuttal will almost come as easy as everyday conversation and your ballots are sure to reflect it. There were lots of concepts I discussed in this post without giving a full explanation since the focus was on the rebuttal itself. If you have questions about any of the concepts thrown out there in this post or would like to see them discussed in more detail later on, let me know.