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Communication?
Year before last, we hosted the CIDD-sponsored Japanese debate team on
our campus. Our top team did an audience-oriented debate with them in
front of a group of students, faculty, administrators, and whomever else
dropped in. And I was horrified! One of the debaters could barely make
it through an outline speech without bursting an artery: he swallowed
words, lost his place repeatedly, and struggled in a number of other
ways. And he had rehearsed his speech a number of times! The other one
spoke fluently and expressively, but **far** too fast for an audience
not accustomed to debate delivery.
So what's the solution? I disagree with Professor Hunt that we ought to
reorient the judging pool to force debaters to incorporate a more
accessible style in competitive debating. I think instead we ought to
encourage debaters to participate in more audience-communication
opportunities outside of tournaments: more public debates, debating
societies, perhaps IE competition if they're interested, etc.
The fast debater in the above example participated in another audience
debate this summer, and the improvement was remarkable. He had slowed
*way* down. It's not that students learn nothing about public speaking
from debate, and thus need outside lessons to fill a vacuum -- it's that
the skills they develop in debate need refining to be transferrable to
public situations. But that doesn't mean we ought to divert or dilute
the process that develops those skills in the first place. I think the
promotion of fast, efficient cognitive processing, word economy,
argument selection, etc. are all functions debate serves that aren't
served to that degree in any other educational setting. And I think that
alternating that with communicative training sessions that they could
easily have in a dozen other locations and situations is a mistake.
Actually, my last two cents went for coffee before I wrote this. Value
it as you will.
Doyle Srader
University of Georgia
<706> 548-9938
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Archive created by Jonathan Stanton (jonathan@cs.jhu.edu)
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