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Middle School Varsity Curriculum Guide
Answering the Counterplan
When you’re affirmative, you have a handful of strategies to beating a counterplan. You can prove that the counterplan doesn’t solve, that you can do both the counterplan and the plan, that the counterplan is a worse idea than the plan, or that the other team shouldn’t get to read the counterplan.
Kinds of Responses
A good way to remember strategies for answering the counterplan is the acronym STOP.
S: Solvency Deficits/No Solvency. These arguments prove that the counterplan can’t solve your affirmative advantages. Sometimes you may have one for each advantage, other times, you may not. If you can prove that the counterplan doesn’t solve one of your advantages, but your plan still does, then that becomes a reason for the judge to prefer your plan.
T: Theory. These arguments explain to the judge why the other team shouldn’t get to read the counterplan they read because it’s bad for debate. You can argue that it’s bad that the negative team gets to use multiple actors in their counterplan text, for example, and you could argue that allowing them to do so gives the negative an unfair advantage since the affirmative only gets one.
O: Offense. These arguments are proof that the counterplan is a bad idea. You can read a disadvantage to a counterplan, a turn, which argues the counterplan actually causes one of your impacts, or prove that the counterplan links to the net benefit.
P: Permutation (Perm). These arguments tell the judge that the affirmative plan and the negative counterplan can both take place. They’re attempts to prove that the two actions aren’t mutually exclusive. Sometimes the permutation, not the plan or the counterplan alone, is the best course of action, and you can advocate for the permutation in those scenarios.
One kind of permutation is the “perm do both,” which argues that you can take both action at the same time. To win this argument, you’ll need to prove that this permutation doesn’t link to the net benefit.
Another kind of permutation is the “perm do the counterplan,” which argues that the plan and counterplan texts are the same thing. To win this argument, you’ll need to prove how the original plan text you read accomplishes the same thing as the counterplan text.
Example Responses
Let’s talk about our example counterplan from before. It looked like this:
Counterplan text: Mark should eat healthier food.
Solvency advocate: Eating healthier food boost physical fitness.
Net benefit: Muscle Soreness DA.
So not only can you answer the Muscle Soreness DA independently, you should also use arguments from STOP to respond to it more directly. These could look like:
Solvency deficit: Healthier food doesn’t boost physical fitness.
Theory: The Healthy Food CP is unfair because it assumes the negative can change Mark’s mindset about eating. The affirmative must work within his current mindset, so the negative gets an unfair advantage and will win more debate rounds.
Offense (DA): (Link) Healthier food is more expensive, and (impact) that means Mark can’t afford rent.
Offense (Links to NB): Healthier food can also cause muscle soreness.
Permutation: Perm do both, Mark can eat healthier and go to the gym. That prevents muscle soreness since eating healthier foods would keep him fresh.