What Is A Final Focus?
The final focus is the last opportunity debaters have to speak before the judge makes a decision. Like the summary speech, it condenses the round down to the most important issues. In the rest of this post, we’ll cover the fundamentals of the final focus and walk through an example from a debate round.
Final Focus Basics
Given by the second speaker, final focus speeches are two minutes long and are delivered to complement the summary speech. Within the speech, the debaters will highlight their strongest points and restate their responses to the other teams’ arguments. It’s important to note that no new arguments are allowed in these final speeches.
A helpful way to think of the final focus is as a “summary 2.0.” Both speeches aim to condense the round and present clear, persuasive arguments to the judge. While the summary organizes the round’s contentions and responses into a cohesive narrative, the final focus takes it a step further—prioritizing key arguments, weighing impacts, and emphasizing the points the team is winning to further develop the story a team wants to develop in the round.
Final Focus Structure
The structure of the final focus is similar to the one given in the Summary. This can either be going argument by argument or creating voting issues. Read more about the two structures here.
Teams have different methods and levels of cohesion between their two final speeches. In any case, it’s critical to maintain some narrative consistency between them. However, while the final focus complements the summary, it is not a simple copy-and-paste job. Whereas the summary focuses more on the play-by-play (in debate, we call this line-by-line) analysis, the final focus is meant to drive home a story and present a coherent narrative of what has transpired throughout the round.
Final Focus in Action
To best understand the final focus, we should look at it in action. For our example, we will be utilizing a debate from the Tournament of Champions, which is widely regarded as the most prestigious high school tournament in the US. The topic is Resolved: The United Nations should abolish permanent membership in its Security Council.
Specifically, we will be analyzing the first final focus, given by the negative team (Saratoga). Before going any further, please watch the speech and take notes. If you are feeling ambitious, it would be helpful to watch the round from the beginning.
Final Focus Analysis
The negative team’s final focus diverged in both structure and on the surface-level narrative that was presented in the summary. This might seem like a contradiction of the earlier advice—and in some ways, it is. However, the final focus was still woven from the same cloth. As the points of contention between the teams shifted, the speech adjusted accordingly, devoting more time to the arguments that had become most important.
In this case, the negative team believed the affirmative team didn’t respond to their weighing-in summary, so in the final focus, they argued that their argument should be evaluated first. This meant there was no need for the long overview read in summary about national interests because the other side agreed to the argument. That said, the core narrative remained consistent from summary to final focus: if the judge votes to affirm, the UN will collapse or become less effective.
Secondly, Saratoga recognized that they were likely winning on their key arguments, so they chose to spend more time reinforcing those points rather than addressing all of their opponents’ responses. To illustrate this shift, in the summary, they responded to five attacks, whereas in the final focus, they addressed only two.
Overall, Saratoga provided a clean narrative in their final focus that was centered on the points they believed were winners.
Final Focus Transcript With Notes
Key Takeaways
- The final focus is a two-minute speech given by the second speaker for each team.
- The speech is meant to be a complement to the summary further focusing on the core arguments with an emphasis on weighing.
- Good teams adapt their narrative from speech to speech to use their time on the major issues that decide judges' ballots.
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