The Art of Round Vision - Mark Roose

What is round vision? 

Round vision is fairly hard to explain. It is even harder to teach. 

In essence, round vision is what the name describes, a view of the round as a whole. Round vision is the art of recognizing at any point in time the strengths and weaknesses of every argument in the round and their implications for the judge's decision. This can be broken into three key considerations. First, the tangibles (or the arguments themselves), second, the intangibles (global perspective), and third, time management. 

Before we get into what to look for when developing round vision, I want to explain how it is done. A significant portion of round vision is subconscious. Spending your prep time deciding which arguments are good or bad is unlikely to be effective. Round vision is a skill developed over time that becomes natural. If you choose to work on it, it can become an almost imperceptible part of the debate for you that will drastically increase your win rate. 

So, how do we develop this skill? The first step is to be conscious of this level of strategy. The most important step is simply to recognize that there is benefit in keeping track of what is going on in the round, all the way down to small details about the judge, wording in your opponent's rhetoric, and the month of your partner's card. These things, when added to the waterfall of information, seem unimportant, but drawn out and applied to specific arguments, they can be devastating. Do not look for a skill that can be mechanically applied to every round; look for the concept that can drive the difference between tight rounds. 

Think of round vision like a military strategist. Imagine you are a medieval commander waging a twelve-day siege on a fortress. Before the siege begins, you will want to plan out the events of each day. You’ll want to know where your troops will go, what tools you will use, and the opportunity cost of one strategy versus another. It will also be important to know what response the enemy will have, what soldiers, specialties, or tools they will respond with, and make a guess of the damage they will cause. Then, after day one, or midway through day five, and certainly before day ten starts, you will want to be able to collect a gutshot vision of the whole siege. You’ll need to know where you are deployed, what's working, what's not working, how close their commander is to surrendering, etc. With this information, you will reposition, shift your strategy, and reset each day to ensure that all your troops are being used most effectively. 

This is round vision. You have twelve segments in the round proper (four constructives, four cross-X, four rebuttals). In reality, the round starts as soon as you enter the room (I actually believe the round begins as soon as you start communicating in the league you are competing in. It is a wonder how often the impressions we make travel far farther and far longer than we expect.) Either way, you should have a vision of where the round will go, and as each speech passes, you need to know where you’re at and what needs to be done to ensure victory. 

Let’s now consider the three main categories you should consider as you take stock of a round: tangibles, intangibles, and time management. 

To the tangibles, this is fairly intuitive. A person with round vision can see which arguments are strong and which are weak, they can see which ones are win conditions and which ones could be dropped. They know the arguments that tie together nicely and the ones that should be pushed to the side. Which arguments to drop, which ones to call out, brush off, etc. A person with round vision can see the status of each argument: does the argument need to be defended, impacted, dropped, repeated, connected to another, etc?

To the intangibles, you’ll need to process this to recognize what is going on. Essentially, identify what you're winning and tell the judge to care about that. A person with round vision can see the overall weight of evidence, credibility, likeability, judge connection, narrative, etc. These are the kind of things we consider global perspective or global arguments. If you know you are winning the evidence war, then you can tell the judge that whichever team can win the evidence war and prove a higher quantity and quality of evidence should win. If you are losing the evidence war, you should develop a global argument that convinces the judge to prioritize consistent and developed logic and warrants that explain and defend arguments. If your evidence is more credible, tell the judge credibility is important; if your evidence is more recent, tell the judge recent evidence matters; if you have studies, tell the judge studies are important. Round vision is knowing which of these your team is winning + which one the judge cares about + which one will benefit all your arguments the most. The center point in those is the position you must take. 

In terms of time management, this is the most nuanced. Debate rounds are short, too short. Real policy makers can make eight-hour speeches on subpoints that we spend twenty seconds arguing. Because we only get an hour and a half, time becomes a great commodity. The shortage of time makes time usage an indicator of value. When a speaker spends a significant amount of time on an argument, this signals to the judge that the argument is important. If an opposing speaker responds to a two-minute argument with only twenty seconds, the judge's mind will register that the original argument was really not so good (regardless of the argumentation). Before I get into too much debate round time theory, I will just say, for round vision, it is important to know where time has gone in the round. Which arguments need more time, which need less, which have your opponents overextended on, and you can win an easy time trade by giving a quick response and moving on? Where can you develop the technical side of a weaker argument, causing the opposing team to eat up time on a response? 

These three categories are powerful as a trifecta. The first ensures that you present the very best arguments, the second ensures that you put those arguments in their very best light, and the third ensures that you do the first two in the most time-efficient way possible. With only a five-minute rebuttal, recovering from a negative block, or just planning a proper (flexible) 2NC strategy, round vision can change your debate round, and ultimately, your debate career. 

This is also just a great way to start developing life skills of assessing situations quickly, in real time, and having a good way to handle them. 

This is the first step to developing round vision. Answer these questions after each round of your next tournament. This will cause your brain to start pondering all categories in round vision. Over time, this will become natural as you recognize the benefits of seeing arguments differently. 

- What was our most/least well-run argument?
- What was our most/least time-consuming argument?
- What was our most/least winnable argument?
- What was our most/least impactful argument?
- Where did we waste time on arguments that didn’t work?
- If we had more time in any speech, what would we have used it for?
- If we had just half the time, what arguments would we have focused on?
- Did we communicate arguments effectively?
- Was there a cohesive strategy?

Let me know if you have questions and what you want to hear about next. 

If you want to start developing round vision with real-time feedback on your rounds, that's exactly what private coaching is built for. Reach out to any of our coaches or directly to me, and we will find the right coach for you. 

Good luck out there, and God bless. 

Mark Roose
Nile Debate Head Coach

I would like to thank Charlie Said for reading the first draft of this blog.