The Affirmative Case

Preparing an affirmative case is all about research and organizing your research and your ideas. Research may be one of the most important skills you will learn in debate. This is the information age, and being able to mine information is like being able to mine gold.

You will need good evidence. It is nice if your case idea has articles and books written about it so that you can learn to marshal the data and facts to fulfill your purpose. Don't be afraid if there is a lot of evidence about your idea, because since you initiate this discussion you should almost always been ahead of your opposition if you know the literature.

Certain negative arguments on many topics become very predictable and very widespread. Identify the most popular generic negative arguments and then design your case so that it answers, better yet, turns these arguments. Unimaginative debaters will use the same generic arguments every time, and you want to be in a position to get victory after victory over them

Negative teams prepare most against the most popular cases. So, you might not want to use the affirmative case which is most common in your region. If your case is slightly unusual the negative team may well be unprepared and debating it for the first time.

Attacking the affirmative case

One of the defining characteristics of debate is clash. Specific disagreement is what judges look for in deciding who did the better job of debating. The center of that clash experience is the negative team's analysis and refutation of the first affirmative speech -- the affirmative case.

Many debaters are tempted to go down each argument used by the affirmative in the case structure and analyze it separately. While in a perfect world with unlimited speech time this would be preferable to show specific clash, in a limited amount of time this is impossible.

One of the most common errors which negative speakers make in attacking the affirmative case is"jumping around"from point to point and not examining the affirmative case in an organized manner. Most affirmative cases take a step by step approach to presenting the team's position, and is thus appropriate for negative refutation to be in that order. Also, if the case is taken in order it is easier for the judge to follow.
Centralize your argumentation

Another common organizational error committed by negative speakers attacking the affirmative case is that they repeat themselves.

This error is usually of one of two types. First, the negative speaker will repeat the same basic argument with mild rhetorical changes at more than one point on the case flowsheet. This fills speech time but does not act as an effective attack and is very easy for the affirmative to respond to, as they simply answer it once (very thoroughly) and then refer all repetitions back to this set of answers. Second, the negative speaker will put different arguments about the same general topic in several different places on the flow. For example, negative arguments about how unemployment does not cause health harms are placed in two completely different places on the flowsheet. In both cases the better options would be to put all of your arguments about a certain issue ("Unemployment does not cause health harms") in one spot, and not fragment or repeat them around the flow. Say it once and put it with other arguments of its kind

Refutation and attack of the affirmative case should be guided by a sense of strategy, not just a reflex action of disagreeing with everything the affirmative utters. Often some of the most useful arguments for the negative team can be what the affirmative has advocated.

SPECIFIC TECHNIQUES FOR ATTACKING THE AFFIRMATIVE CASE
Utilize challenges. A"challenge"is an argument which indicates inadequacies in the arguments of the opponent and urges their rejection or degradation as a result. Something is missing or imperfect about an argument. Perhaps an argument is missing a logical step, involves an argumentative fallacy, or confuses the specific with the general. These elements can be specified and pointed out in attacking the affirmative case.
Demonstrate its importance. Now that a problem has been found in a particular argument, it needs to be reevaluated based on this new characterization. The error that many debaters make is in assuming that because an affirmative argument is not perfect it should be rejected. Rather, it would be far more credible to say that the argument is not as strong or lacks relevance to the point it is trying to prove.

The negative team should attack the affirmative case explicitly and immediately. This will gain them a refutational advantage as well as demonstrate to the critic the kind of clash which so many judges are looking for. Familiarity with a finite number of techniques can render the negative attack on the affirmative case far more effective.