The Art of the Overview

In this video, Taylor talks about how to great overviews on the aff and the neg. Taylor goes over how your overviews should change over the course of the debate.

For the aff, great overviews should describe the harms or impacts of the aff. Isolate two to three impacts or harms that are different from each other, not repetitions. Use active verbs to describe your impacts that you can pull directly from the evidence. Taylor gives what an example overview on racial capitalism would entail. Each impact should represent a different tier of thinking about your impact. You need to also describe how the affirmative solvency overcomes the harms. Building out strong solvency arguments in your overview is also necessary.

Your overview in the rebuttals should be no more than 30 seconds.

For the neg, instead of impacting out the harms, you should describe your meta-link to the aff - your thesis argument about what is bad about the affirmative's approach. You should think of your overview as the thesis. You want to talk about how your alternative resolves the problems you state.

Over the course of the debate, your overviews should get more comparative and should increasingly implicate your impacts in the debate. Overviews become more narrative over the debate to frame the debate.