If you’re in Team Policy Debate, hopefully by now you have a wealth of evidence dumped somewhere, ready to use at your first tournament. The problem comes when you’re in a debate round, trying to find where exactly you put that one perfect card. 

I present to you – the affirmative hitsheet…

Despite what autocorrect would tell you, it’s not a hit-list but an extremely helpful way of organizing your affirmative backup evidence.

Usually, affirmative teams resort to dumping piles of evidence into huge ‘2AC’ documents, loosely categorized by stock issue. The problem is that not all Solvency cards say the same thing, and trying to sort between a long list of tags during prep time is entirely inefficient. 

The defining aspect of a hitsheet is the idea of organizing it by negative argument, so you can easily identify the best piece of evidence you have to respond to a given argument during a debate round. But how, you might be asking, could we possibly do that?? Well luckily, I have three handy steps to help you create an affirmative hitsheet!

Step 1: Choose broad headings like you would for a 2AC document

My standard broad categories or headings are usually: Definitions, Topicality, Significance, Solvency, Disadvantages, and Advantages. (Separating Disadvantages and Advantages allows me to easily differentiate between evidence that shows that we aren’t doing terrible things with our plan, and evidence showing the tangible benefit we’re giving our judge.)

Step 2: Write down every negative argument anyone has ever run

This might seem labor intensive, but it really isn’t, especially if you start your hitsheet early in the year. 

Under your Topicality, Significance, Solvency, and Disadvantages headings, write down all the corresponding negative arguments teams have run. And if you haven’t had many practice debates yet, brainstorm possible negative arguments with your partner, parents, or just yourself, and write those down.  

If you look at my formatting below you may notice the A/T “”. The A/T stands for ‘answer to’ and the quotations set the negative argument apart just to make sure you recognize it as the negative argument you’re responding to.

Step 3: Write your response(s) and sort your evidence

Under each negative argument, write a tag of your response. Under each response, sort the evidence you have. I usually like to put an asterisk by my favorite piece of evidence for each argument so I can quickly identify the best evidence mid-debate. If you don’t have evidence or it’s a silly point, write a couple sentences of a logical response you can quickly read mid-debate so that you know what you’re going to say. This is also a good way of knowing which arguments you need evidence for. 

This is how I format an argument and response in my hitsheets: 

Broad category:

A/T “Negative argument”

Affirmative response

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Evidence or rhetoric response or both ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

As an example of how you can format your hitsheet, here’s mine from a couple of years ago: (Our case was to give the same rights of family reunification to recipients of subsidiary protection as refugees in the European Union) https://docs.google.com/document/d/17HNpX2oq9Iz2RMEx-T760d1sk7be2bkrSjhS5TQdFzE/edit?usp=sharing 

A couple of final notes. First, this is your hitsheet, so feel free to organize it however best helps you during a debate round, and however is best for your case. You might notice that some of the Solvency in my old hitsheet is not perfectly organized, and that’s okay. Affirmative backup documents are more of an art than a science, so feel free to experiment. The most important thing is that you can quickly find the evidence you need when you need it. 

Second, if you have evidence that doesn’t really fit under any particular negative argument, feel free to still make a separate 2AC document with all of that evidence in it. Then your hitsheet can be your best specific evidence for responses, and your 2AC can be your evidence dump for random statistics or good cards you want to keep, but probably won’t use very regularly. 

Go forth and organize!