Home Sweet Home: Writing and Defending Your 1AC

The affirmative gets infinite prep, first and last speech, and gets to choose the topic. So why does the aff ever lose?! Often, the aff loses debates because they have a poorly-built 1AC. Putting a lot of thought and research into your 1AC is key to winning on the aff.

Getting the House in Order

Your 1AC should be written with the 2AR in mind. Just as a 1NC is better if it includes multiple strategies, the 1AC needs to have several different strategic uses that can be deployed against a multitude of negative strategies. It’s important to have different versions of your 1AC prepared for debating against particular arguments or in front of particular judges.

A good 1AC usually has some built-in answer or tricks against the most common negative arguments on the topic. This can either mean a “big stick” aff because it draws from a broader literature base to directly take on the generics or it can mean a smaller aff that avoids links to generic disads. For example, the “withdraw from Iraq” aff has a lot of literature to draw from when writing 2AC blocks and accesses large impacts that can be weighed against disads. On the other hand, the “remove TNWs from Turkey” aff has less advantage ground but probably doesn’t link to troops or spending disads.

Usually, you also need to have built-in answers to non-US counterplans, 50 State counterplans and consult/condition counterplans. This means having a US key, federal government key, and certainty key warrant in your 1AC. All of these arguments make winning solvency deficits against counterplans much easier.

The Foundation

The plan text is the focus of the debate. It’s the foundation for all of the aff arguments and much of the negative strategy. Therefore, you need to devote a lot of time thinking about how you should word your plan text. Think about what each word means for possible topicality, counterplan, disad and kritik arguments that could be run against you. Ideally, you should be able to defend, with evidence, why you chose each word that you did. For example, if you include “immediately” in your plan text, this may create competition for a delay or phase-out counterplan. If you don’t have a defense of the word “Afghanistan,” don’t include it. You get to choose your plan, so make sure it’s one you are comfortable with!

Square Footage

What size should the house be? This depends on how much work you want or can do and how sustainable you need the aff to be. Typically, the “big stick” aff lasts longer and has more strategic flexibility. Choosing an aff at the heart of the topic usually means that you can draw from a larger literature base, meaning more advantages to choose from, more extensions, and more truth on your side.

However, a smaller aff can also have strategic benefits. It can take the other team by surprise or avoid generic negative arguments. If you’re intention is to win by being unpredictable, devote some time into thinking about what a cornered team will do. A team without a pre-written strategy may lean on their generics, topicality, or even impact turning the aff. For example, “squirrelly” affs may be only questionably topical, and a negative team without a specific case neg may go for topicality to make up for a lack of case answers. Be prepared.

There is also the risk that these types of affs can be “one trick ponies.” Smaller affs are less likely to have truth on their side. If your aff relies on the negative team not noticing a huge flaw or can be beaten as soon as anyone does any work against it, you won’t be able to read it for long. Having several new affs may be fun, but if you can only read it for one debate you might find yourself doing a lot of work with little payoff.

Structural Problems

Try to avoid these common mistakes when building your house:

Too few Advantages/Impacts. Too few impacts hurts your strategic flexibility. You’ll be stuck defending that one impact for the entire debate, often making it harder to outweigh the negative strategy as well as making it impossible to kick out of some advantages if you need to.

Too many Advantages/Impacts. Writing a 1AC with too many impacts also hurts your strategic flexibility. For example, some write advantages in this style:

Plan key to solve heg. Impact card.

Plan key to solve terror. Impact card.

Plan key to solve nuclear war. Impact card.

Plan key to solve warming. Impact card.

Plan key to solve proliferation. Impact card.

The two card advantage model that tries to fit as many impacts as possible into a 1AC is risky for a few related reasons. First, since there are no preempts to negative arguments, almost all case defense read in the 1NC has to be responded to with cards read in the 2AC. Since you don’t have a sustained defense of any of the impacts, a 1NC could spend 4 minutes impact turning, and the 2AC would have to read many, many cards because none of the preempts to this strategy were in the 1AC. Second, it means that you aren’t diversifying your internal links and are more susceptible to counterplans. If all of your internal links are the same, it means that a counterplan that solves one of the internal links would solve all of them, thus neutralizing the benefits of reading so many impacts. It’s better to have many internal links so it’s easier to make counterplan solvency deficit arguments: “They may solve the troop levels internal link, but they don’t solve our perception internal link.”

A better model is to have fewer advantages (2-3) with lots of different internal links and defense or preempts to common arguments. For example, if you were reading a proliferation advantage, you’d want to start by having a few different internal links to that impact. You’d also want to have answers to common negative arguments against proliferation, such as answers to proliferation is slow, countries don’t have the technology, it doesn’t cause war, etc. That way, the 2A can utilize these arguments in the 2AC to answer case takeouts and can be more efficient in their already time-pressured speech.

Imprecise plan text. Poorly written or vague plan texts put you at risk of losing topicality and counterplan debates that you otherwise wouldn’t. Every word in the plan text matters.

Maintenance & Upkeep

Writing a 1AC is a continuous process. Your pre-season 1AC will probably be very different than the 1AC you are reading at the end of the year. Constantly update your aff. If you lose to the same argument several times, change your 1AC to beat that argument. Keep what works and get rid or fix what doesn’t.

Research to discover as many of the potential negative arguments as possible and write blocks to them. Any work done before the debate that saves you time and effort during the debate is time well spent.

Know your aff inside and out. This means keeping up with the literature. It may be helpful to set up a Google News Alert with search terms related to your aff. You can find new advantages this way and you’ll be one step ahead of the negative if you’ve already cut answers to their new strategy.

Protect Your House!

You will be spending a lot of time with your 1AC. Know it. Love it. Nurture it. Protect it. Build a strategic 1AC that you're comfortable with and take advantage of being aff!