Former HS debater, our district desperately needed judges for districts last year so I've judged in the past year. Speed-reading is a problem in Policy, but I d

Former HS debater, our district desperately needed judges for districts last year so I've judged in the past year. Speed-reading is a problem in Policy, but I don't think it's spreading and not to PF especially. At least where I live, judges are broken out with the most sophisticated going to Policy and LD and Public Forum gets who ever is left. When I did PF it was totally normal to have a HS Bus Driver or some freshman's mom as a judge. In that environment spreading and weird arguments could actually make you lose (although so could a judge's hard biases.) Once you made it to semis you might start to get former LD/Policy debaters as judges and so you might speed it up or adjust the rhetoric/evidence. But that's what made PF so fun, you had to read the audience and adjust and you only had a month of practice and a few four minute speeches to do it. Maybe I'm insulated because I went to a midwest high-school who didn't care much for the elite tournaments but we still managed to do well at nats. EDIT: >High school debate today is basically an intellectual game, not an exercise in truth-seeking. That depends on your perspective. I'd say the judges learned some things in my debates, would they have changed their minds? Probably not, because 16 year olds just aren't that convincing to most people. It's like that bear joke, you just have to be better than the other guy. But what about my opinions? They may have never changed in the midst of a debate, but case-building is definitely an exercise in truth-seeking. Debaters get more out of it than judges but that'd be natural, they're the ones poring over all the evidence and picking out the good bits. Being adversarial with yourself as you write an aff and neg is far more enlightening than any other approach I've found.