Guide to the Constructive

The constructive is arguably one of the most important aspects of the Debate Round. It’s where you first present your arguments to the judge, and as such, it is important that you have one which is clear and accessible to all readers.

The basic breakdown of the constructive is as follows:

First line: In the first line of the Constructive, you want to make the position you take within the topic clear to the judge (however, in some cases this is not necessary - more below!). For instance, if you are on the Neg side, you would say “We negate.” Similarly, if you were on the affirmative side, you would start the speech with “we affirm.”

Contentions: In Debate, we call each argument within a case a “contention.” Most cases contain 1-3 total Contentions although the average case contains two. Contentions should be unique arguments that differ from each other.

The basic structure of the contention can be broken into the following:

• Uniqueness: What is happening right now? Why is this specific topic important?
• Link: How can your side improve this issue?
• Warrant: Why does this happen? What is the reasoning behind it?
• Impact: How does the thing that is happening impact the real world? Does it send the economy into a recession? Does it decrease global warming? Does it reduce poverty?

If you have all these items - congrats! You’ve successfully written your first constructive argument.

If this isn’t making sense - no worries! Let’s look at a sample contention. This contention below was run at the 2023 Tournament of Champions. Before reading this contention, you need to know that the topic revolves around whether the United States government should pursue a ban on Biometrics (fingerprinting, Facial ID, DNA, etc.) which collect personal data. In this contention, the team is on the CON (or AGAINST banning biometrics) and as a result, argues that we should NOT ban Biometrics because they are used to identify patients. The team furthers that conventional means of identifying patients are not accurate. See if you can identify (and highlight?) the Uniqueness, Link, Warrant, and Impact.

Our first Contention concerns Medical Innovation.

In the United States, biometric recognition technology has been used in a wide array of applications to give better patient care and save lives. The first application an affirmative ballout would destroy is patient identification.

Historically, a large challenge in healthcare has been identifying patients quickly and accurately. Indeed, a study from Johns Hopkins details that more than 250,000 deaths per year occur because of medical error in the United States.

Fortunately, the intersection between healthcare and biometric recognition technology is working to solve this issue.

Thakkar of Harvard in 2021 elucidates that biometric identification includes fingerprints, iris scans, and face recognition. These identifiers are crucial, as a study from the National Institute of Health confirms that the Biometric Patient Identification system being implemented across the country identifies individuals at a near 100% accuracy rate.

The second life-saving application is in screening for diseases.

Winterton of Healthline in 2023 finds that biometric screenings are being used to measure medical identifiers, from BMI, blood pressure, cholesterol levels, and blood sugar, to screening for anomalies in an individual’s DNA.

These scans are crucial, as Healthline furthers that they’re used by healthcare providers to predict when an individual is at risk for a disease. For this reason, Ameritas in 2022 finds that over 100,000 lives each year will be saved by these tools.