Gary’s Q&A

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Let’s start with the first question, which comes from Dave Hudson on Patreon, because membership has its privileges. He asks,

Hi Gary, long-time member of the completionist club, I love this show. Thanks so much for my daily dose of great knowledge! My question is – are there any alternatives to the format of college debate? I remember seeing a story about it (I think it was 60 Minutes), and I was shocked at the speed. I understand the concept that it is about the number of points the debater can make. My question is, are there any other debate societies in college or beyond that focus more on a measured approach that scores based on the quality of the argument as opposed to the quantity?

For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, academic debate at its highest level is a very fast-paced activity. For most of my debate career, in both high school and college, I was first affirmative and second negative. The first affirmative constructive, the first speech in a debate round, is the easiest as it is scripted. The first affirmative rebuttal is usually considered the hardest speech in a debate round, as you are responding to 12 to 15 minutes of arguments in just 4 or 5.

As such, you have to talk very fast. Likewise, knowing their advantage, the negatives might try to speak quickly and put forward many arguments to cause problems for the first affirmative.

So, that was me. Like everyone else, I had to learn to speak very, very quickly, at a rate that most people probably couldn’t comprehend unless they were trained to listen at those rates.

My college debate coach was Scott Nobles, who was the very first National Debate Tournament champion in 1947. When I was debating in the late 80s and early 90s, I asked him how this style of debate developed, as he had been around for the entire history of the activity by then.

He said it started in the late 1960s. The team most notable for the style, known as spreading, was a team from the University of Houston, known as the “men in black” because they always dressed in black. So, this style has been around for over half a century.

Needless to say, not everyone liked this. In the 1980s, an attempt was made to create an alternative form of debate called Lincoln-Douglas Debate or LD, in high school. It was one person instead of two people, and the intent was for debaters to talk more slowly.

However, LD soon fell into the same habits as two person debate, known as policy debate.

In the early 2000s, another form of debate, called public forum debate, was developed. Public forum was similar in structure to policy debate, except that the speeches were shorter, the topics changed more frequently, and, most importantly, the debate rounds were judged by lay people from outside the activity, not by professionals within it.

As such, it remains much slower-paced.

In college there is a format called parliamentary debate, which is more akin to public forum, and it has been around a while.

That being said, the speed at which debaters talk is not a reflection of the quality of their arguments. It is still usually the quality of an argument that will win.