In order to award argument points, a voter must do two things. First, they must survey specific arguments and counterarguments from both sides which impacted their voting decision. This survey must be comprehensive, which is to say that it must survey all or most of the main arguments in the debate, or must explain why certain arguments need not be weighed based on what transpired within the debate itself.
It would take hours to list each of the twenty plus arguments and or counter arguments and explain why they should or should not be considered main arguments. This makes a true RFD unmanageable and necessarily a comprehensive summary of the entire debate. Since the term Main Arguments is not clearly defined, either by the rule makers, or the debaters themselves, or by the moderators, it is a purely subjective and arbitrary measurement.
It would make more sense to focus attention on the Debate Resolution Itself and ignore any arguments that do not either directly support or directly attack the Debate Resolution Itself.
Second, the voter must explain how the arguments and counterarguments they reference impacted the outcome that the voter arrived at. In other words, the voter must weigh the arguments and counterarguments they identified. Weighing entails analyzing how the relative strength of one set of arguments and counterarguments outweighed and/or precluded another set of them, and then, in turn, how this strength imbalance led to the decision to give one debater a win as opposed to a loss. This requires situating the arguments and counterarguments being analyzed within the context of the debate as a whole.
"Situating the arguments and counterarguments within the context of the debate" would require retyping the entire debate in your RFD.
The voter must assess the content of the debate and only the debate, any reasoning based on arguments made or information given outside of the debate rounds is unacceptable. This includes reasoning that stems from already-placed votes, comment sections, and separate forums. Votes that impermissibly factor in outside content and which are reported will be removed.
This is a particularly bizarre rule, which seems to impossibly hamstring any potential voter by disallowing even basic logic as being used as "reasoning" to be included in a sufficient RFD. For example, if, as is commonly the case, both debaters go full gish gallop with tangential off-topic rants, and both sides ignore 80 to 90% of what their opponent says, and I try to carefully pick through the chaos to find statements that directly address the Debate Topic Itself (either PRO or CON), and carefully analyse the logical coherence of those statements, then my RFD is considered "insufficient" because, not only did it not comprehensively survey the entire debate, including all of the "main arguments" but, on top of that, by making reference to basic logic, I am then accused of using "information given outside the debate rounds".
