Channeling Your Inner Top Speaker

Channeling Your Inner Top Speaker

Introduction

This guide will function as a guideline as to something many can’t teach well: speaking better. The article will be mainly tailored toward traditional debaters, as rhetoric and speaking style is substantially more important in traditional forms of debate than progressive forms of debate.

DISCLAIMER: Advising and recommending styles of speaking does not necessarily mean that style of speaking is the “right” way to do it - ‘top speaker’ and ‘rhetoric’ can be very vague at times and must be garnered through practice and may adjust to one’s own unique preferences. This article is simply a supplement to that practice and can function as a recommended guideline. 

Speeches

Quality over Quantity

In traditional debate, it is much preferred to argue qualitatively rather than quantitatively. Instead of spamming five responses to a subpoint, one ought to argue perhaps two or three qualitative responses. Here’s why:

1. A parent/honestly any judge loves it when they can intuitively get an argument and they ‘resound’ with it. This requires a qualitative argument that isn’t made to cover the flow, but rather an argument that is made to on-face respond to another argument/make its own voter. 

2. We all know debating AFF is hard because of that brutal 1AR. I’d like to suggest a tactic called “2AR-able arguments”. Every argument in your 1AR should be a possible 2AR collapse/voter. Every. While this certainly seems like a high threshold, it helps maintain the quality of the 1AR argumentation during times when you need to cover the entire flow in a short period of time while being able to make the 2NR hard. 2AR-able arguments make the 2NR spend a substantial amount of time on the argument because of its quality, while being able to cover an argument without having to spam worthless responses. They also are incredible ways to garner speaker points. Sometimes it is not about the way you speak, but rather what you are speaking about. 

3. While quantitative responses may put the 2NR or 1AR in a hard position, a good debater must always look ahead to their next speech. If your argument is actually intuitive and has in-depth logical reasoning to it, no matter how much time the Negative spends on it, there will always be a hole to exploit in the 2NR simply because the quality argument drills that hole. Additionally, specifically parent judges like when they don’t have to write too much and they are able to follow through. It is much more likely for them to follow through with a quality, intuitive argument, rather than 5 arbitrary responses.

Tone & Phrases

In traditional debate, judge adaptation and speaking rhetoric is as much of a skill as actually going down the flow and debating, so here’s a couple ways you can adapt with your tone & phrases. 

1. Really good transitions & signposting! “Look at the framework level-debate”, “We have two key responses”, “The thesis of our argument is..”, “Starting on Contention 1, where they articulate that…” You want to make it very easy for the judge to follow the flow and generally easy for them to understand what arguments you are referring to. When adapting to parents, you should not just say “Contention 1 is wrong, because…”, you need to reiterate what Contention 1 is, and the relevant arguments in it that you will be responding to! Parents do not flow much, if at all - so you need to be able to remind them of the argument you are responding to, otherwise your response doesn’t mean much at all. 

2. Confidence! This isn’t something that can be effectively learned by reading an article on a nonprofit website, but it definitely is something people can learn to get a start on developing. Think about it like this when you walk into your round: I know my case like the back of my hand, and whatever they say, I know I’ll be able to respond. Confidence comes from the effort you put in – you will inevitably feel nervous if you aren’t comfortable with the research you put in, you’re not comfortable with how many blocks you have, you put your case together last night. If you want to win, you have to show the judge that you are a winner - and you do this by displaying why you deserve it and how much you worked for it. Judges really like it when students point out historical flaws and unique, specific arguments against evidence that display how much they’ve thought and are familiar with the topic.

3. Packaging! This is probably the most important but also the most vague part of this article, because there’s no right way to say this. When I say packaging an argument, I’m talking about the way debaters frame arguments. No matter how bad the argument is, a really good debater will find some way to make it sound good. This comes with practice, practice, and practice – I quite literally cannot teach it to you. Things, however, I would suggest to start practicing are a couple drills & activities:

   1. Time Descending Redos: Redo a 4 minute 1AR from one of your previous rounds, and after doing that, do a 3 minute, then a 2 minute one, so on. You need to try to give a winning 1AR that sets up the 2AR effectively each time, no matter the time constraints. This will help you immensely when it comes to concising things up and figuring out ways to package an argument, because usually the best framing of an argument is something that is short and memorable. 

   2. Read current events/books/literally anything: This is probably the best thing when it comes to framing arguments. Reading and developing your lexicon allows for not only higher and faster word retrieval, but also the development of cognition skills that are important to learning how to phrase certain arguments. 

   3. Observe and Comment Drill: Point at a random object in the room and do a 60 second quick impromptu speech about it. Don’t even think beforehand. It will be hard at first - but do this every day, and you’ll see what happens. 

Cross-Examination

This section will be relatively short — in terms of speaking skills, there’s not much to it. Personally, I think speeches better reflect an estimation of speaker points, but here are my suggestions.

1. Be Polite - I cannot stress this enough. Do NOT be overaggressive, judges really do not like it. You can make your opponents feel bad by making their case feel bad during speeches. If you want to attack their case in Cross-Examination, please please please make sure that you are making it very clear that you have a problem with the case and not the debater. Some level of aggression is good, but I would be very cautious depending upon what kind of judge you have. If you have a parent, your tone should not raise in its level - you can ask questions to poke holes, but make sure you balance it with respectful questions as well while maintaining a standard tone. A traditional coach or a circuit judge probably will not vote you down on CX rudeness, so you don’t have to worry as much. 

2. Framework & Explanation Questions - Cross-Examination is a really good time to explain arguments that might be confusing to certain judges, especially framework. Asking people good questions of their framework to see if there’s a hole in it helps the judge understand their framework less and less. On the other hand, if YOU know your case and your framework really well, you will be able to answer any attacking case or framework questions. When you answer them, make sure to explain them concisely while being thorough, so you can fill any processing gaps the judge might have with your argument. Framework is also probably a skill that most LD debaters lack depth on — most will not be able to normatively justify their criterion. You obviously don’t have the time to normatively justify anything truly, but you can poke holes in their understanding, i.e. the lying nazi question to deontological frameworks. 

There are obviously numerous strategies debaters would want to employ, given that each debater is different and unique in the way that they want to go for arguments. However, I hope the article helped you get a start!