Cross-Examination in Policy Debate: Making a Plan
This article was originally published in the January 2013 edition of the Rostrum.
“Cross-examination is a lost art.”
This is a common refrain among judges and coaches—you will read it in judge philosophies and hear it bemoaned in coaches’ lounges. Like most common refrains, it doubtless contains some truth, but also something false: debate probably never had any more of a “golden age” than anything else in our world. There have always been debaters who excelled at cross-examination (CX), and used it to their advantage, and there have also been debaters who wasted it. In this article, I’d like to set forth some general tips for making cross-examination more effective.
One of the most common frustrations with CX, from a judging perspective, is that debaters seem to be proceeding at random, asking whatever question occurs to them first, no matter how irrelevant: “Your second piece of inherency evidence, saying we don’t have solar-powered satellites now, is this from a qualified source?” Another common frustration is that debaters use the cross-examination time to ask procedural and logistical questions, rather than substantive ones: “Did you read all the underlining on this piece of evidence?” or “Can you give me another copy of your viewing document?” Some give up on cross-examination completely, frequently asking the judge, “How much time is left?” or asking obviously pointless questions just to take up time: “So how’s your tournament going so far?” A memorable Dana Carvey SNL skit from 1988 parodied George H.W. Bush’s own CX failures—they were all along these lines.
All of the preceding misguided uses of cross-examination stem, I believe, from one fundamental problem: the debater asking them has failed to make a plan. You would never give a speech with no idea what you were about to say; likewise, you should not begin cross-examination in a similar fashion. The fundamental purpose of CX is to help the crossexaminer’s team win the debate. This may seem obvious, but based on hundreds of cross-examinations I’ve seen, the point needs to be made. When you are planning your cross-examination, make plans to ask questions that will help you win the debate.
General Tips
Before giving some guidelines about each individual cross-examination period, here are some overall ideas that will apply to all of them.
Ethos matters. Aristotle realized long ago that the credibility of a speaker may be the most effective means of persuasion that a speaker possesses—and CX is one of the main times you can showcase this credibility. If your opponent stands up for his/her speech, stand next to him/her during cross-examination. If your opponent is seated, it’s okay to sit down, but in any event, stop staring at your laptop for three minutes. Make eye contact with the judge, display a real sense of concern and seriousness during the CX. If you think judges “don’t listen to CX,” a lot of the time, that’s because you don’t demand their attention. Most of the time, they’ll listen if you seem like someone who deserves to be listened to.
Ask strategic, not informational or logistical questions. Ask questions which, if they are answered in certain ways, will help you win the debate. Do not ask openended informational questions such as: “Can you describe your first advantage?” This just provides the other team with an opportunity to filibuster. Also, do not ask purely logistical questions like: “How much of the Smith 7 evidence did you read?” You can ask about those sorts of things during prep time.
Ask about arguments, not evidence. A huge amount of CX time is wasted with questions such as: “Where in your Royal 10 evidence does it say that recessions always cause global armed conflict?” Your question implicitly grants something you don’t want to grant—that if the evidence does say that, it is true. You are at that point letting them get away with a fairly transparent instance of the appeal-toauthority fallacy. A much better question along the same lines would be: “How is it possibly true that recessions cause global armed conflict? There have been ten since World War II, haven’t there?” If they want to talk about the Royal 10 evidence now, to answer your question, they can, but note you’ve focused the issue now on whether the argument is true, not just whether the claim is made by the evidence.
Do not nitpick. It’s easy to get distracted by irrelevant details, especially when you are right about them. So, suppose a given piece of evidence read by the other team is underlined in a way that doesn’t form a complete sentence. There is no need to ask them about this, even if you are right. Will it decrease their credibility? A little bit, perhaps. Will it win you the debate? Not a chance. Always try to ask about things that at least have the potential to help you make significant portions of your team’s last rebuttal stronger.
Follow up effectively. This is a tough balancing act. One the one hand, avoid merely asking single questions, and then moving on to other questions. After your opponent answers your first question, think about how you can follow up, so you can seize more ground. Keep doing this until you’ve almost gotten them to where you want them. But—and this is also tough—at that point, when you’re almost there, stop. When your next question is, “So doesn’t that mean you lose the debate?” (or something equivalent) don’t ask it. The judge probably knows where you’re going, your opponent will most likely just say “no,” you’ll just keep re-asking things, and it will be awkward for everyone. You may also just be giving them opportunities to backtrack, getting out of the trap you’ve put them in, or re-thinking a stance they shouldn’t have taken.
Use your arguments (and your partner’s) later. After you’ve gotten to almost where you want to get, save that argument: don’t advance it in the CX, but in your next speech (or, most of the time, your partner’s). This means listening to your partner while they are CX’ing your opponent. I know much of the time you are prepping, but at least keep an ear open. Nothing is more frustrating to a judge than the 1A getting the 1N to make a devastating concession about a counterplan, say, and then not hearing the 2A mention it in the 2AC. That argument will now just disappear; it might have won you debate if you had just remembered to make it.
Speech by Speech
In what follows, I have laid out what I see as the best way to achieve the purpose of winning debates in each of the four crossexamination periods in Policy Debate.
The 1AC CX. When questioning the 1A, contest the claim(s) being made in the 1AC which, in order to win, you will most need to disprove. This is most likely not, “What is the source qualification for your second piece of inherency evidence?” So what might that claim be? Suppose you’re A-strategy for the debate involves winning a disadvantage, and winning that it outweighs the case. The key claim you will need to disprove here is most likely about the magnitude of the affirmative impacts (to prove the DA impact is bigger), or maybe the timeframe within which the affirmative will solve (to prove the DA will happen before the case is solved for), or maybe it is a question of impact access (you want to prove your DA accesses an impact better than their affirmative). If your A-strat involves a counterplan, perhaps it is contesting their “federal government key” claim(s). If it’s a kritik you intend to win on, it is probably something involving the epistemological or ontological presuppositions of their impact or solvency claims. Once you have determined what the claim(s) are, focus in on them for the entirety of the three minutes. If, by the end of the 1AC CX, you have brought any of these questions into serious doubt in the judge’s mind, you have succeeded.
The 1NC CX. When questioning the 1N, highlight the biggest problem you will need to establish with each offcase position. This can be fun, especially onsidering the large number of extremely contrived and illogical positions often presented in the 1NC. Find one good question about each off-case argument— one question about the CP, one about the DA, one about T, etc. Do what you can to establish the negative’s inability to answer each one, and move on to the next one. You need to be efficient here, especially if the 1NC strategy was wide-ranging, as it often is.
The 2AC CX. When questioning the 2A, re-establish your case arguments (if there are any) by asking about their 2AC answers to them, and/or ask about what you think is the most important answer on each offcase position. The 2AC will often undercover case arguments, just using tagline or author-name extension to respond to the 1NC. Ask questions that make the inadequacy of this strategy clear. On the off-case positions, more judgment is needed: specifically, try to determine what argument against your most important off-case position they’ve made that they think is the most important one. Then, try to cause problems for this argument with your questions. For example—you’ve presented a politics disadvantage. They have made a link-turn argument that you think they’ll want to go for: you need to go after this link-turn argument. Of course you may be wrong about what they want to go for, and your questions might even make them change their mind, but that’s one of the things that makes debate fun. Exception to the “no logistical questions” rule—asking about voting issues or “reasons to reject the team”—spend a few seconds (but only that) to make sure you haven’t missed any arguments that would result in you losing the debate if you don’t answer them. Make it your habit, at the start of the 2AC, to confirm all of the voting issue-level arguments the 2A advanced.
The 2NC CX. When questioning the 2N, re-establish your best argument against the position which the negative team seems to think they will win the debate. The 2A’s CX of the 2N is a very important moment, coming right in the middle of the debate. It is the only faceto-face verbal confrontation between the last two rebuttalists. Most debaters, though, waste this opportunity (even more than they waste the other CX opportunities). If you are the 2A, refocus your energies and ask yourself this tough question: “Okay, I’ve now heard the 2NC. Based on that, and what I think the 1NR is about to talk about, how does the negative see themselves winning this debate?” After you’ve asked that, ask another, also tough question: “Given my guess about how they think they’re going to win, what questions do I need to ask to make that harder for them?” This probably means working to re-establish the truth of your strongest argument against their most likely path to victory. For example— they seem like they are going to try to win the debate on a kritik; you think your best argument here is a permutation. Spend the 2NC CX asking them skeptical questions about their answers to your permutation. If you can win that those answers aren’t good, you can win the permutation much more easily in the 2AR.
Conclusion
Cross-examination is not a “lost art”—it’s just a neglected one, and probably always has been. Cross-examination provides you with your only opportunity to confront your opponents directly; take advantage of this opportunity. Work to ask more persuasively worded, strategically relevant, argumentatively significant, truth-focused, and logically related questions of your opponents, and then use them in your speeches. Your debating is bound to improve.
Joshua Brown was the Debate Coach at Homewood-Flossmoor High School from 1999-2012. He is a member of Homewood-Flossmoor’s English and World Langauges Departments.