Debate Advice: Link Extensions on Ks
By: Alexandra Mork
Debates can often get muddled, especially in Lincoln-Douglas due to the lack of speech time to flesh out arguments. When debaters don’t label or organize their arguments, it’s very easy for judges to miss them. While some people like to extend all of the links in the overview, I personally like to extend them when answering the aff’s permutation because all of the links to the K are disads to perm, which forces the aff to line by line the links if they want to go for the perm. Regardless of where you like to extend your links, here is some advice for link extensions:
A. Name the link - choose a few words that summarize your argument. For example, “meritocracy”, “victim blaming”, or “fear of extinction.” Having a quick name for your link will help your judge flow because if you just start reading your link block without a tag, your judge will inevitably miss some of your explanation.
B. Refer to your author – reference the author in your 1nc that explains the link. Because some judges flow author names, this might help them understand what part of the 1nc makes the argument that you’re extending in the 2nr and will make them have a higher threshold for new 2ar explanations.
C. Warrant for why the link matters - this is just an in-depth explanation of the link. First, explain what you are criticizing (for example, if your link is to the aff’s invocation of ideas of meritocracy, explain what meritocracy means). Then, explain why your criticism matters (for example, explain why you think meritocracy is bad).
D. Specify where in the aff they have done this - often times, aff debaters will say that they don’t link to your argument, so having a robust explanation of how they do can be very important. In some cases, the link won’t necessarily be obvious. If you’re reading a critique of Kant’s racism, the aff may claim they don’t link because Kant’s personal biases don’t impact his theories. To answer this, you must explain why the author is inseparable from their theories. This argument becomes even stronger if you can point out specific examples of how the author’s personal biases is revealed through the 1ac’s claims. However, even in these scenarios, it’s still preferable to pull specific lines from the 1ac to prove the magnitude of your link. Rather than just saying “extinction reps are bad,” you can explain how their specific extinction scenario reifies the problems that you criticize. For example, if the aff says warming leads to extinction and their authors identify the 2 degree threshold as necessary to prevent catastrophic climate change that will “threaten civilization,” you can explain how that logic ignores the millions of people around the world who are already suffering from the catastrophic impacts of climate change, and thus their authors implicitly define “civilization” to mean western civilization.
E. Impact – you should explain an external reason for why the link produces bad results. If you’re reading a capitalism kritik and you have five links, you obviously shouldn’t just explain the generic reasons (i.e. environmental destruction) as to why capitalism is bad while explaining each individual link. In this case, you should explain your impact and why it matters at the top of the speech and say that all of your links prove they produce that impact. However, ideally, most of your links also have individual external impacts that you can extend.
F. Why this proves the AFF can’t solve and/or why this turns the AFF - explaining the implication of the link in terms of the aff is very important because it prevents the aff from making arguments as to why the case outweighs. If they want to leverage the case against the K, they must first disprove the link.
Thank you to Elijah Smith for his lecture on kritiks at GDS that I used to help write this article!