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9.2 Summarizing: What to Discuss
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This text will discuss some general principles of what should be included in a summary, and will then describe three broad methods of summarizing. As with all elements of debate, no simple formula for how to construct a good summary exists. Multiple ways to execute a good summary are available to any creative debater. But, following these general rules will likely lead to a better and more persuasive speech.
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Whatever method is used to summarize the debate should allow the Whip speaker to directly compare both sides of the debate. A major danger, especially for new debaters, is to focus only on the good things that their side of the debate is offering, and not to directly compare these things to arguments that the other side is offering. A Whip speech that engages in direct comparison will, to some extent, acknowledge that the other side has some reasonable concerns, and will weigh those concerns with the advantages the Whip’s side is offering. For example, imagine that the Government Team in a debate is advocating making all recreational drugs legal, while taxing and regulating their sales. The Government side will likely discuss issues like the increased tax revenue that will pay for beneficial government programs, the diminished influence of organized crime, and the increased government respect for individual autonomy. The Opposition side will likely discuss issues like the increased use of drugs that are dangerous to users and bystanders, the destruction of individuals’ lives and innocent family members’ lives, and the promotion of corporations likely to be linked to organized crime. Presumably, the debate would also have been filled with a variety of objections to these arguments and responses to those objections. In that example, a good summary might compare the value of increased government respect for autonomy with the harm of more broken families due to drug use, or compare the two sides’views on how legalization would affect organized crime. The comparison may be about which values are more important (e.g., autonomy vs. family stability) or simply about what state of affairs is likely to occur (e.g., will organized crime grow or shrink?), but the point is that the summary should place the visions of the two sides next to each other so that they can be easily compared.
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Remember that one side does not need to win every point in order to be successful. Thus, the Whip speech can be an ideal time to admit to the audience that the other side does have one or more valid points about some issues in the debate. Still, the Whip speaker will want to avoid agreeing with the major arguments of the other side. Therefore, why might the Whip speaker want to grant the other side any points at all? Several reasons for such admissions are possible: 1) Agreeing takes much less time than trying to argue about every point; 2) if a particular side has not spent much time disputing an issue, agreeing can have the effect of trivializing the point in the minds of the audience; 3) most importantly, agreeing can sometimes significantly increase the Whip speaker’s ethos (i.e., credibility) as a speaker. In many situations, ethos is of tremendous value in a debate. One can think about the decision to accept an opponent’s argument in this way. If at least some good reasons did not exist on both sides of the motion, we wouldn’t be having the debate. Therefore, a debater cannot claim with much credibility that the other side has no good points. So, by willingly admitting that the other team has pointed out a real harm from taking his or her side, the Whip speaker is demonstrating that he or she is being genuinely rational and reasonable, and that the Whip speaker is not simply disagreeing with everything that the opponents say. When using this kind of strategy of agreeing with the best points of the opponent, the Whip speaker may demonstrate that the argument being admitted is clearly outweighed by the benefits gained, and so the position of the Whip speaker’s side is still clearly superior.
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The summary should not discuss everything in the debate that has been disputed, so the Whip speaker should identify which issue or issues will be discussed. Obviously, the Whip speaker will want to discuss those issues that are most important in the debate. The most important issues often are indicated by what the debaters have spent the most time talking about, however, the amount of time devoted to an issue is not always an indicator of what is actually most important. Asserting that something is an important issue means that the issue has the most relevance to which side of the debate an intelligent audience ought to believe. Thus, Whip speakers should generally not spend time discussing unimportant issues, except perhaps to very briefly point out why they are unimportant.
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At the same time, Whip speakers should focus on discussing the issues in the debate that are advantageous to their side. In most cases, both sides will have issues favorable to their respective sides. Because the Whip speakers want to persuade the audience that their side is correct, they probably will want to spend more time discussing the issues that most clearly support their side. However, focusing only on the arguments supporting the whip’s side of the debate should not be done to the extreme that the Whip speaker ignores important issues in the debate that are more supportive of the opposing side. If a Whip speaker focused only on the issues supportive of his or her side, the audience would correctly perceive that that speaker was simply avoiding the difficulties facing their side, and would not be persuaded. Instead of ignoring those issues, the Whip speaker should briefly but clearly explain why they are either irrelevant, relatively unimportant (i.e., outweighed by the other considerations), or mistaken. Presumably, other debaters on the same side have already tried to respond in these ways, and the Whip speaker should use the best responses to very briefly undermine the other side’s strongest arguments. Generally, good Whip speakers will spend most of their summary on issues that their side is winning, but will not ignore important issues just because their side is not prevailing on those issues.
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In a summary, as in all cases of refutation, a debater should spend as little time as possible restating or explaining the other side’s arguments. Ideally, the Whip speaker will be able to refer to opponents’ arguments with just a quick word or two. The point here is that the Whip speaker should not spend valuable speaking time re-explaining (and so, reinforcing) their opponents’arguments. Whip speakers will want to spend more time developing and explaining their own arguments. For example, even if each speaker on the other side spent three minutes talking about the injustice of capitalism because of the inevitable disparity between the rich and the poor, a Whip’s summary can refer to all of this argument as “injustice and inequality.” So, the Whip speaker might say something like “The opposition argued repeatedly that our plan would create unacceptable inequality, but they fail to appreciate the reality of modern economics; our economy is not a zero-sum game and we cannot possibly have both an efficient, prosperous society and complete equality.” Of course, the Whip speaker would then go on to explain this analysis more fully, but the point is that the speaker would not repeat the other side’s argumentation unless that speaker was going to show a specific flaw in their argument.
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Perhaps the most important general goal of a summary is to analyze the debate from a higher perspective. Competitive debates can often be seen as a series of disputes over the validity and importance of a wide range of arguments and objections to arguments, put forward by the four teams in the debate. Individual debaters often are concerned with the tactical conflict among these arguments and objections, and often have a tendency to focus on the details of those arguments and lose sight of the larger strategic perspective of how all these smaller argument conflicts affect the overarching question (i.e., the motion being debated). Importantly, the judges in the debate are probably taking the larger strategic perspective during the entire debate, and that larger perspective is certainly the one that the judges will attempt to take when trying to decide which team prevails. So, the job of the summary section of the Whip speech is primarily to guide the judges into a “big picture” perspective that will be beneficial to the Whip’s side and team. In order to guide the adjudicators to the bigger perspective, the summary needs to avoid the small conflicts in the debate and, instead, step back to look at what was most important in deciding who is right about the motion being debated. The Whip speaker needs to give the judges a new lens though which they can examine about 45 minutes of debating and more easily make sense of what are the important issues in the debate. Essentially, the summary section of the speech needs to rationally focus the judges’ attention and simplify the inevitable confusion created by 45 minutes of intense debating. For this reason, some refer to summarizing as “crystalizing.” The idea is that the process of crystallization can transform a liquid solution of particles that are disorganized and opaque into a solid well-organized object that is “crystal clear.”
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9.3 Summarizing: How to Organize
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This section will discuss three common ways of constructing a Whip speech, ranging from simple and minimally effective to subtle and very effective. Although limitless methods to construct a summary exist, and although a great debater may offer an excellent summary that does not fall into any of the three categories, most coherent summaries fall into one of those three groups. This text will call the three methods: Repeating, Regrouping and Reframing.
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9.3.1 The Repeating Method
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The Repeating Method is common among newer debaters, but usually is not the most effective method. This method constructs a summary by first identifying those arguments in the debate that best support the Whip speaker’s side (and especially the closing team), and then building a summary around those arguments, trying to explain why they are the most important arguments in the debate. As with all the methods, the Repeating Method can be performed in a better or worse way. The summary will probably begin with an outline of the issues on which the Whip speaker will focus in the summary. Using the Repeating Method, the speaker picks out a few disputed issues from the previous speeches on which the Whip speaker can clearly prevail, and then highlights those in the summary, arguing the best things that his or her side has to say about these. Ideally, debaters using this method will also explain to the judges why these issues are the most important to the debate, but this often does not happen.
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The advantage of this method is that it is fairly easy to use. Debaters can usually identify the arguments on which their side is prevailing, and then, all that they need to do is organize the summary by explaining why each of the issues supports their side and why they are the central, or most important issues, in the debate.
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One problem is that the audience will probably think that they have heard all of this analysis before and the speech will therefore be rather uninteresting. The Whip speaker could make a legitimate contribution by pushing the analysis of these issues even deeper, which would add something new of interest. However, doing so is both difficult at this point in most debates and moves the speech deeper into details at a time when the audience really wants help in getting a better sense of the big picture.
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Being amusing and clever is almost always a good way to improve a speaker’s persuasiveness, and the Repeating Method can be marginally improved by creating an argument for the choice of issues to crystallize, so that the Whip speaker does not appear to be simply choosing the issues that the closing team is winning. The idea is to pick some amusing theme around which to build the summary. For example, a Whip speaker arguing against legalizing recreational drugs might say:
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“I will summarize this debate by focusing on five key issues, represented by the letters D, R, U, G, S. ‘D’ for the danger to individuals. ‘R’ for the rights that people don’t have to do whatever they want. ‘U’ for the underworld of criminals that this will actually promote. ‘G’ for the government bureaucracy that will be created. And, ‘S’ for the social fabric that will be shredded by this disastrous policy.”
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Countless clever ways exist to introduce the issues used to summarize the debate, using common cultural references, jokes, or anything vaguely amusing. Ultimately, these tactics do not make the relatively weak Repeating Method good, but at least, the Whip speaker will seem clever, and that cleverness may help a bit. Overall, if done well, the Repeating Method can be minimally effective and will be much better than a rambling Whip speech with little coherent organization. But, compared to the other methods discussed below, using this method will significantly limit the effectiveness of a Whip speech.
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9.3.2 The Regrouping Method
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The second method of summarizing is the Regrouping Method, sometimes called the disjunctive method of creating a summary. The word “disjunction” is just a fancy way of saying “or,” The most common form of disjunctive summary is usually called a stakeholder analysis, but other approaches are structurally similar. This section will first discuss stakeholder analysis, and then some less common approaches to the Regrouping Method.
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Debaters offering a stakeholder analysis will first clarify that those people affected by the Government Team’s interpretation of the motion are either in group 1, OR group 2, OR group 3, etc. They are all the stakeholders, all the people who are affected, and whose interests need to be considered in the debate. After identifying these groups, the Whip speaker goes on to explain how his or her side of the debate benefits each of these groups more than the opposing side. If everyone benefits more, the audience will clearly conclude that the position maintained by the Whip speaker is better. Once again, consider the example of the drug legalization debate. The stakeholders in this debate could be drug users, families of drug users, and the rest of society. But note that stakeholders always can be divided using a variety of different methods. Another division could be current drug users, those who would start using drugs if they were legal, people who produce and distribute drugs, and law enforcement workers. Different ways of dividing groups of people will make supporting the speaker’s side of the debate easier or harder, so the Whip speaker needs to think carefully about how to classify the groups that will be identified as stakeholders, considering how those groups are made better off by his or her side in the debate. A summary using the Regrouping Method should be based on groups that appear natural, unbiased and significant, rather than contrived to fit a debater’s particular agenda. Also, the groups that are used should not omit any important stakeholders, or the summary will appear very incomplete and unpersuasive.
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The fundamental idea behind the Regrouping Method is to consider the set of important arguments that have been made in the debate and regroup them according to the different perspectives to which they are relevant. In a stakeholder analysis, those perspectives are defined by different groups of people affected by the debate, but perspectives can be divided in other ways, as well. A different approach is to take the perspectives of various academic disciplines, such as economics, politics, ethics, sociology, feminism, religion, etc. A Whip speaker does not need to take all of these perspectives, just the ones that seem most relevant to the discussion at hand.
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Another Regrouping Method can be used when the debate clearly surrounds issues in one particular discipline, such as moral philosophy. Imagine a debate on the motion, “This house believes that grown children have a moral obligation to care for their aging parents.” In this case, a Whip speaker might start her summary by saying,
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“Three primary types of moral theories have been debated for centuries and although we are certainly not going to decide which is correct today, I will demonstrate that all three of these theoretical perspectives support my side’s position concerning a moral obligation to care for one’s parents. Since all these perspectives agree that my side is correct, the right answer in this debate is obvious.”
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