Middle School Novice Curriculum Guide

Impact Comparison

As you can see with “minimize” and “outweigh,” part of your job as a debater is to compare your arguments to your opponent’s arguments. The most important part of your arguments to compare are your impacts. But what is an impact? If you’re affirmative, it’s what will happen if we don’t pass the plan. For the negative, it’s what happens if we do pass the plan. It’s how the judge will decide whether doing the plan is a good idea.

Let’s look at two example impacts:

Team A’s plan is to destroy all nuclear weapons to prevent future nuclear wars. Their impact is:

• Assertion. Nuclear war kills millions of humans…

• Reasoning. …because nuclear blasts create a nuclear winter…

• Evidence. …proven by Carl Sagan’s 1983 book that explained how these weapons would alter the climate and cause crop failures, leading to starvation.

Team B argues that nuclear weapons deter countries from going to war because of the threat of destruction. Without them, bigger countries would invade smaller countries and abuse their human rights. Team B’s impact is:

• Assertion. Wars cause human rights abuses…

• Reasoning. …because countries try to impose their will on others…

• Evidence. …proven by research conducted by the United Nations Council on Human Rights.

But how do you convince the judge that one of those two impacts is more important than the other? There are three standards that you can use to measure an impact. There’s a handy acronym to remember them by, MR. T.

Magnitude: the size or scale of an impact. When talking about magnitude, ask yourself questions like: How important is the impact? How many people would it affect?

Risk: the probability of the impact. Ask yourself: How likely is the impact to happen?

Timeframe: the amount of time the impact needs to take place. Ask yourself: How fast will the impact happen?

Let’s use our hypothetical global warming impact to create a MR. T, or an impact overview:

Nuclear war is the most important impact in the debate round. It outweighs their human rights for three reasons.

First, Magnitude. Nuclear war has a higher magnitude because if one happened, every human would starve in a nuclear winter, and we couldn’t have human rights in the first place.

Second, Risk. A nuclear war is likelier because China, the United States, and Russia are increasingly at odds with one another, and a small miscalculation could cause conflict.

Third, Timeframe. A nuclear war is faster since it only takes a few minutes for each country to launch their nuclear weapons, and they would need more time to launch an invasion without them.

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