Update for PDF Kankee Brief Users

If you are primarily open Kankee Briefs via Google Docs/Microsoft Word, you can ignore this post. Reading this post will likely only be useful if you use the PDF version o Kankee Briefs files.

Kankee Briefs releases our Briefs and our AT Files in both the Microsoft Word and the PDF format. The flexibility in file format is to aid debaters who do not have a Microsoft Word license, or lack the hardware to run Microsoft Word, such as Chromebook users.

For our PDF users, all future files (including the recent NCFL Nationals Brief) have the following improvements

PDFs have Bookmarks of Verbatim Headings

Verbatim has multiple varieties of headers to sub-divide debate documents. These include pockets, hats, blocks, and tags. Normally these headers are shown in the navigation pane in Microsoft Word. This means you can jump in-between different cards and contentions via the navigation pane as opposed to scrolling up/down several hundreds of pages to look for a specific argument.

PDFs sometimes include these headers in the bookmark panel. This is also known as document tabs, document outline, sidebar, and/or list view. Generally, these can be found via the top-left corner of the PDF toolbar, and then selecting an icon that looks like a bullet point list. However, this is contingent on the file creator formatting the file to include these bookmarks.

As of today, new PDF versions of Kankee Briefs will now include headers in the bookmark panel. If you need assistance finding the bookmark panel, select the the name of your browser to open an external link with a browser-specific explanation (Google Docs, Firefox, and Edge

Internal Links in Table of Contents and Topic Analysis

For reference, An internal link in document formatting is a distinct concept from internal link chains. In a document formatting context, an internal link is a hyperlink in a PDF that jumps to a different page number within the same PDF. This is different from external links, which will open a new web page. Examples of internal links are table of contents for book chapters and endnote citations for research articles.

In a debate context, often a topic analysis covers multiple overlapping issue areas, such as the differing affirmative and negative perspectives on an argument. Kankee Briefs will now include internal links to similar contentions that are worthwhile to cross-reference to increase your understanding of the topic.

An example is the recent NCFL Nationals healthcare topic. Concepts in Marxist theory aid in critiques of healthcare commodification, as Karl Marx wrote extensively on the problems of the commodity-form, use-value, and exchange-value. Understanding the Marxist critique of commodities is intrinsically useful for affirmative argumentation: however, this is also valuable to comprehend argumentation in other contentions.

In a public health contention, debaters could argue that healthcare commodification causes physician burnout, which worsens the quality of care and exacerbates the shortage of medical professionals. Even though it is not necessary to take a Marxist standpoint to run this contention, the argument is strengthened by understanding that physicians have historically implicitly viewed themselves as members of the professional managerial class.

Due to their status as being categorically distinct from the average worker, physicians had autonomy over the means and methods of production. However, due to the commodification of healthcare, physicians have felt increasingly alienated with their new status as employees within corporate-managed and monopolized healthcare. Overall argumentative strength of the contention was bolstered via using concepts from multiple disciplines, both Marxian political economy and healthcare economics.

Similarly, the Marxist distinction between exchange-value and use-value is helpful in explaining why commodified-healthcare results in neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). The continual presence of NTDS resulted in the underdevelopment of economies in the Global South and bad health from over a billion people, implying that health goods and services that prevent NTDs ought to be highly valued and prioritized. However, despite their exorbitant use-value of anti-NTD health interventions, NTDs are neglected by pharmaceutical and healthcare corporations (hence why they are neglected).

This is why the topic analysis links Marxism contentions to physician burnout and NTDs; having a comprehensive political theory undergirding policy analysis allows you to make a grand narrative for why markets are failing, as opposed to simply arguing how they are failing.

Files are Easier to Open

Previous PDF versions of Kankee Briefs routinely had issues opening on certain computers. This is due to the sheer size of debate briefs, especially when considering shrunk text, highlighting, and underlining.

This problem should be fixed now. Previously to circumvent this problem I included instructions for debaters to email me a request to send whatever subsections of a brief that they needed in PDF form. This process should no longer be necessary, as all PDFs should be openable by anyone and everyone.

I am not going to reformat all previous briefs. However, upon sending a request to karkingkankee@gmail.com stating what specific files you need a PDF version of, I will send you the updated file. For instance, previous topics often overlap with the current topic, so perusing old files for reference materials can be good for topic research.

If you are interested in how this problem was fixed, I have listed instructions of how to convert large Microsoft Word files into PDFs below. This process may be useful to know about if you encounter extremely large Microsoft Word files, such as backfiles and impact cores, from another source like Open Evidence, and you need to send a PDF to anyone unlucky enough to not have Microsoft Word

However, for anyone else who doesn't have that niche problem, all the PDF changes have been listed above, so you don't need to continue reading

How to Convert Large Microsoft Word Debate Files to PDFs

Save as, do not print to PDF.

To add bookmarks, go file => save-as => save-as PDF => options => select create bookmarks using headers.

File => info => check for issues => inspect document => inspect => remove "document properties and personal information" and remove "custom XML data".

Be cognizant of the context and purpose behind why you are making a PDF for and the hardware. If the PDF is only being used for printing for paper debate, additional formatting, such as headers, can also be removed.

Elsewhere in Microsoft Word settings, you can also remove the ability to select text in the PDF, effectively making each page in a PDF an image to compress the size and decrease computational demands. You can imperfectly reverse this process with optical character recognization (OCR) software, which is free online and is natively integrated into Verbatim. However, OCR should be your last ditch effort at recovering a document due to how it routinely misreads text and produces errors, harming evidence integrity.