Around the time you were born, I bought a brand new car. It was a Toyota Corolla, and it was perfect. Toyotas virtually never break down, and this little bitty Toyota saved me a ton of money on gasoline. Plus, I could park it in the tiniest spot: I bragged that if you could fit dental floss in a space, then my Corolla would snuggle in nicely.

I didn’t re-think my choice until I went to visit an old college debate friend. At the time I lived in Texas, and she lived in Kansas, and I took the trip in January. Not far into Oklahoma, I found that the highway was coated with ice. By the time I got to Lawrence, the ice was thicker than frosting on a hipster cupcake, and every gust of wind was slapping my little Corolla around, sometimes across the middle stripe. Come to find out, my friend had bought a similar type of car, but one that was much, much heavier. She was a native of Chicago, and knew what she needed to travel safely in icy conditions.

The lesson I took from that was no car is ever perfect; they’re perfect for conditions. No Marine would ever drive my tiny Corolla through Haditha and feel safe against IEDs; there’s a reason they traveled in armored Humvees. On the other hand, my car would be ideal for twelve or thirteen clowns to climb out of in the middle of a circus ring. It would be far less impressive if they did that with an eighteen wheeler.

The point applies with equal force to one’s affirmative case. No affirmative is ever perfect; they’re perfect for conditions. Their relative strength depends on what arguments negatives are using to win debates. Marshall McLuhan used to say that any new broadcast medium (radio, TV, internet) that came on the scene never fully replaced the older ones, but instead drove people to repurpose all the predecessors. TV didn’t kill radio, but just moved it from the living room to the car. McLuhan’s theory is called media ecology, and if you want to understand the winning potential of your affirmative, you have to think hard about how it fits into your circuit’s argument ecology.

Hold that image in your head while I lay out a few more lessons on how to pick the perfect affirmative for your conditions.

Above all else, you need to be led by what you find in your research. The dumbest, most unpromising way to settle on an affirmative is to sit on the couch and daydream up things that sound topical and appealing. What you come up with that way will work about as well as those early flying machines you find on YouTube in black and white newsreel footage; the designers thought they should work, and they certainly looked like they were going to work, but when they were launched, they immediately crashed.

Instead, go and read, read, read. Find solvency evidence that’s quite precise about what the plan mandate ought to be. Until you’ve reached that stage, you’re not yet putting together a debate argument; you’re just wasting your time. But once you’ve found at least two potential affirmatives in your accumulated research, then the selection process begins. Step one is to work backward from the negative arguments. There are two ways to do this.

You can do it at the start of the season. If you’ve found solvency evidence that’s compelling enough that you’re ready to doodle out the plan mandates, then stop right there. Drop everything, and go do the most extensive, earth-scorching negative hit you can. Find every argument imaginable. Brainstorm out every unevidenced argument that you can make sound appealing. Then, and only then, start doing the slow and careful reading of affirmative sources, and make sure there’s a compelling answer to each substantial negative argument. Know how you would phrase the explanation in the 2AR if the round came down to any one of the arguments you discovered in your negative hit. If at any point during that process, it strikes you that the affirmative is an uphill fight, and the negative arguments are fundamentally better, abandon ship.

One critical part of this process is to make sure you don’t set out with an incomplete set of negative arguments to answer. One of the giants of college debate, Dr. Robert Rowland, who won the National Debate Tournament himself and coached another winner, once told me that whenever he thought up an affirmative, his own coach would question himendlessly, asking question after question on any topic that was remotely plausible or relevant. It is a very worthwhile use of your time, once a possible affirmative has passed preliminary vetting, to get together with the best debaters you know and have a lengthy question session. Record it if you can, and transcribe it into a set of arguments which you have to be able to answer. And keep in mind you might have to answer it three different ways: as a simple argument from the first negative, as a very developed and explained objection coming out of the negative bloc, and then as a round-deciding argument in a second negative rebuttal. For your 2AC, you need an easily grasped explanation and quality evidence that keeps your options open; for the 1AR, you need the same thing, but with razor-sharp word economy; and for the 2AR, you need a way to phrase it, put it in perspective, that effectively ends the debate in the judge’s mind.

The other way you can work backwards from negative arguments involves a mid-season start: you can work from live negative arguments that you’re finding hard to beat. One year, the teams I coached were debating a pollution topic, and negatives were winning on the states counterplan with an international modeling net benefit: if we got the balance between federal and state power right, then Russia (among others) would imitate us, and they would smooth out relations with the former Soviet republics, which would prevent war. I researched and wrote my teams an affirmative that regulated the use of de-icing chemicals on commercial airliners, and we lay in wait for that counterplan. We had disadvantages that said if Russia devolved regulation of its airlines, it would cause a huge hit to their economy, and would also result in devastating plane crashes that would kill thousands. On top of that, we had powerful evidence that regulating interstate air travel was a federal prerogative, not a state’s right.

Another time, my alma mater, Baylor, wrote an affirmative that they hoped to hold in store for an opponent who liked to run the Japan counterplan, as in have Japan do the plan instead of the United States. Baylor gave earthquake assistance to Egypt – building earthquake-resistant buildings and responding after earthquakes. They then debated Wayne State in the octofinals of the National Debate Tournament, and Wayne loved to run the Japan counterplan. The Wayne first negative said “The Japanese have lots of earthquakes, so they have expertise in building for them and responding to them, so they’d solve 100% of Baylor’s harm.” But Chuck, the Baylor second affirmative, unleashed a string of evidence about how terrible Japan’s anti-earthquake measures were, and Baylor won a very lopsided debate.

Beyond working backward from negative arguments, one way you can recognize a promising affirmative is whether it supplies you the ability to go either direction on particular outcomes of the plan after you hear the negative arguments. The year I wrote the deicing affirmative, another set of popular negative arguments were political disadvantages which said that if the affirmative plan was popular, or unpopular, then its passage would alter the odds of other legislation passing, which would result in (what else?) nuclear war. We had several pages of quite good evidence saying the plan would result in a lot of delayed flights, which would be enormously unpopular. But we also had several pages of quite good evidence saying changes in airline regulation that made the flying public feel safer were always extraordinarily popular. We would therefore wait until the negative made the argument one way or the other, and then we would argue turnarounds on the link. Because our evidence was case-specific, and because we had that argument every round, we tended to come out ahead on that issue, so people learned that political disadvantages weren’t a very effective strategy against us.

Another affirmative I wrote for the same debaters, two years earlier, abolished federal judges’ ability to hold people in the courtroom in contempt of court without a hearing, a practice called summary contempt. The topic that year was about criminal procedure in federal courts, and many negatives were winning a lot of debates on court credibility, the argument that any change in court procedure would undermine public confidence in the legal system. But other teams were arguing evil court, the idea that the justice system was an oppressive sham that deserved to fall apart. Once again, we came prepared with a good deal of evidence saying judges too often abused their summary contempt power to vent explosions in temper, which undermined public confidence in the justice system. We used that evidence to link-turn court credibility. But we also had evidence that the summary contempt power was the only deterrent to defendants running amok in the courtroom, and its abolition would destroy the court system, and we used that evidence to turn the evil court argument. So, if you can think of a plan outcome (popular or unpopular, strengthen or weaken the court) that negatives are using as their way into a disadvantage, and you can collect evidence that lets you argue your plan could result in either outcome, then you can lay a trap for your opponents and turn the tables on them once they’ve already committed to a position. That’s always been a leading criterion my debaters apply to the search for a good, strategic affirmative.

Another important consideration: never run an affirmative you do not understand, or are not good at explaining. This can be very tempting when debaters that you respect rave about how their pet affirmative is so perfect, so unbeatable, but you have to resist that temptation. My junior year in college, my teammates wrote an affirmative about trade negotiations with Japan, and won a number of very good debates against more successful teams with it. My colleague and I ran it for the first three tournaments of the season, but there were wrinkles to the affirmative that I always struggled to explain, and nuances that I never quite understood. Midway through the season, we switched to an affirmative that subsidized China’s switch from ozone-destroying chemicals to ozone-safe substitutes, and all of a sudden we started bringing home our own big wins against top teams. One of the conditions that makes an affirmative good or bad is its click, its resonance, with the debaters who are explaining it. A major factor that makes a huge difference is doing the research yourself, possibly reverse-engineering it from a sourcebook affirmative by chasing down all the sources and re-cutting them from scratch. But even an affirmative that’s your original creation can be hard to explain, so just as you would make sure your shoes fit properly before you started a marathon, make sure your affirmative fits you properly before you start a tournament.

The last condition to fit: which of the basic profiles of affirmative best matches your strengths and neutralizes your opponents? I categorize affirmative into the four esses: stick, small, sad, surprise. “Surprise” I already discussed above: the affirmative that lets you take an unexpected position after the negative has already committed to a strategy, so I’ll take the other three in turn.

“Stick” is short for “Big Stick,” as in speak softly and carry one. Big stick affirmatives do something very large, and claim a very large advantage. Over the years, on various topics about space exploration, some teams run a Big Space Colonies affirmative, putting whatever resources are necessary into space colonies. They then claim that life on earth is doomed for a number of reasons – inevitable nuclear war, climate change, magnetic pole flip, ozone depletion, big solar flare, antibiotic resistant superbugs, antimatter weapons research, and possibly more – and their plan is that a colony off earth provides an insurance policy for survival of the human race no matter what happens. The plan is a huge investment of resources, and is thus a sitting duck for disadvantage links, but the advantages are so very large, and the debate so big and challenging to manage, that they can roll right over opponents who aren’t very prepared.

“Small” is an affirmative that does very, very little, but avoids most negative arguments. It’s something that makes fundamental good sense, and is very hard to pin down. Running a small affirmative is a matter of running silent, running deep, and making a very elusive target. One year, on a Middle East topic, I wrote an affirmative for my teams that declassified a single GAO report. The GAO report outlined some major sources of funding for the Palestinian National Authority, and we had evidence saying everyone already knew the contents of the report. Our advantage was simply that classifying documents unnecessarily was a bad idea, maintained a habit of secrecy, poisoned the organizational culture of the national security state and encouraged group-think. We said declassifying a single GAO report would not solve unnecessarily classification, but that each declassification of a needlessly classified document was a move to change that culture. The affirmative came out in a single critical debate late in the season, and won a lopsided victory for us over a very good team.

Finally, there’s “Sad,” the affirmative that taps into the judge’s emotions. The last year I debated in college, I worked on an affirmative that overruled the Supreme Court’s decision in DeShaney vs. Winnebago County. We began the speech by telling the story of Joshua DeShaney, a four year old boy who had been beaten by his father until he had to be institutionalized for severe brain damage. We even had a moment of silence during the 1AC in his memory. Later in the debate, if people argued politics or other generic arguments, we would ask “How many four-year-old children should we beat until they’re vegetables to make sure the fast track authority for Chinese trade talks makes it through the Senate? Would a hundred be enough, or should we brain damage an even thousand, just to be on the safe side?” Some of the most by-the-flow debate wonks were moved to respond to their conscience and confront the absurdity of a lot of debate arguments when we framed it in those terms.

Run a Stick affirmative if your opponents are more eloquent, but you’re better organized. Run a Small affirmative if your opponents are aggressive debaters who like to overwhelm their opponents. Run a Sad affirmative if your opponents are mental chess players who win on the minutiae, but sometimes lose sight of the big picture. And run a Surprise affirmative whenever possible, because one of the best ways to win debates is to think two or three steps ahead of your opponents and maroon them on ground that they can’t defend.

People sometimes think of the negative as the improvising side, and the affirmative as defending the citadel against attack, but my experience tells me that’s wrong, especially in rounds between experienced, successful debaters. Affirmative selection and defense needs to be just as dynamic, nimble and responsive as negative strategy. Adapt your affirmative to the conditions you encounter, fit it intelligently into the local argument ecology, and you’ll win a lot more debates, and you’ll build your argument savvy into something you’ll use all your life.

Dr. Doyle Srader is professor of Speech and Communication at Northwest Christian University in Eugene, Oregon. He has been involved with competitive forensics for more than three decades. He has coached debaters and speakers at Baylor University, the University of Georgia, Arizona State University and NCU. Students Dr. Srader has coached have placed second at the National Debate Tournament, and won national championships in ADS, poetry, duo interpretation, program oral interpretation and pentathlon. For the past four years, Dr. Srader has served as host for the Stoa season-opening West Coast Classic on the NCU campus.