Decide, with your partner, what harms under the topic are the most important. Develop a structure of harms. Let us suppose, for example, that this year's topic requires the Affirmative to provide a program to guarantee employment for all U.S. citizens now in poverty. You might consider all of the many problems associated with poverty: homelessness, malnutrition, alcoholism, drug abuse, violence, poor education, and even suicide.
Structure the major harms into an outline form:
1. Poverty breeds significant harms in American society.
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A. Poverty implies inadequate shelter.
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B. Poverty leads to malnutrition and starvation.
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C. Poverty leads to psychological harms.
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1. Substance abuse.
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2. Mental illness
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3. Domestic violence.
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4. Suicide.
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The next step is to develop an inherency contention: locate the causes of the harms, and show how the harms are direct outcomes of current laws and policies. What causes poverty? Lack of jobs, for a start. But what about people who have low productivity, and thus are earning low wages? Such people often have large families, so that their tiny paychecks can't stretch far enough. And what about federal programs to relieve poverty? They function, but they don't reach all the poor, and they don't usually give enough money to end poverty. The inherency contention might put this all together.
2. Poverty is ingrained in the status quo.
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A. Millions of people are poor.
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1. The unemployed live in poverty.
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2. Those working for low wages are often poor.
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B. Government poverty-relief programs have failed.
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1. Rules exclude many of the working poor.
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2. Benefits are inadequate.
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