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Books for kids / Houghton Mifflinspeaking speed and lack of analysis

I realize that the liberal arts thread has split into two different threads
about administration support and debate practices that harm the 
perceptions of debate.  I will focus on the later.

Speed is not the problem with CEDA or NDT.  I have had many friends and
facualty watch "fast" debate rounds and follow the entire debate.  The
primary reason that these people could follow the debate was because 
the debaters spent time evaluting the evidence presented and applying
it to the overall significance of the debate round.

The problem with many debate rounds is that there is little effort
made by many debaters to evaluate each issue in the round to the
the judge.  I have judged many speed rounds in which the last two
rebuttals evaluated all of the arguments in a way that made my 
decision painfully clear by the end.  Through analyzing the issues
in a clear way, regardless of the rate of delivery, the true issues
and arguments were easy to follow and very intellegent and professional
in presentation.  If you are looking for examples, look to Glenn from
SIU and Mikey from Marshall (there are many others, however, these two
are our supposive "unethical" and crazy debaters).

In comparison, I have judged LD and Parlimentary rounds that were terrible
to follow.  All of these rounds were very slow, but there was absolutely
no analysis or comparisons made in the round.  At the end, I had to
dig through the flow to find the reasons to vote.  As a result,very 
little persuasion occured and little information was exchanged.

I want to point out that I am not attacking LD or Parli as a whole.  However,
I find that each arena of debate suffers from many "technocratic" behaviors
that tend to ignore information processing by increasing the amount of 
information presented.  A lot of comparisons have been made from debate to
the coming info age.  If debate is about to grow because of the new
info age, then we need to be instructing debaters to analysis and compare
this information instead of just presenting it.  Speed of delivery is
really not the problem.

As for debate programs that bring new debaters to rounds to get a feel for
it, show a little common sense.  Your examples are equivalent to me
taking a new speech comm student to our 512 Rhet Criticism class and
going, "here, this is our typical class.  Enjoy!"  Instead of
taking new debaters to speed rounds or even any varsity rounds, take
them to novice rounds where you know each team involved will present
the material in a way that you want the new debater to follow.  
Personally, I would love to show my new debaters to a person like
Mike Ross, and go, "see that, that is what you should do." (well,
except for running world gov every round and having a hick accent
from hell....love ya mike; I'm, just kidding!)

Well, I have to go and finish up those damn final research projects.
C-Ya later,

Kelly Young
Ball State University
Graduate Student--does this ever end?
Archive created by Jonathan Stanton (jonathan@cs.jhu.edu)
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