Hey everyone welcome back to another blogpost today we have a very, very, very fun project to talk about. The project in question was called “The Great Debaters” We as a class debated each other on topic we chose at the PLP Winter Exhibition 23! I debated my friend Ben on lowering the gambling age. 

 Be it resolved that the legal age of

 gambling should be lowered to 16 

I argued the negative Ben argued the Affirmative. The main reason I chose this topic was I didn’t have a better one to do and I thought it would be interesting to debate. You can watch the debate here. 

The driving question for this project was: How can we use a formal debate to convince an audience we’re right?

I believe that the debate above showcases this well because Ben and I were both prepared, dressed right, and confident. 

To kick off this project was wrote a ten sentence persuasive piece of writing I wrote mine on why Calvin and Hobbes is the best Comic Series ever we then went ahead and made changes to it adding things like Logos and Pathos (emotions and logic), parallel structure, and tone. I found through this that my writing leans more towards emotional side of things you can read said paragraph below 

We had some speech practice with these writings and that is where I found parallel structure to be important as it made the words flow better. 

Next we started our research on our debate topic creating an annotated bibliography to sort the notes. This was a very necessary but annoying part of the project. What made it difficult was that each source had to pass the CRAP test, CRAP in an acronym for currency, reliability, authority, and purpose. Using this criteria to judge whether your sources are reliable I found 4 great sources that all provided very useful information. 

Bibliography

Moving on it was time to craft the speech. For me making a first draft wasn’t to bad because my notes were all organized and I used them to build my speech around. However when we got to the revising point this was much harder I needed to add more parallel structure, and some more Pathos to my writing. Then most tricky part of this project publicly debating at the winter exhibition. This was definitely the hardest part for me as I don’t like public speaking but do think its something everyone should be good at and this project really helped me get better at it. What helped was practicing a bunch with my friends and classmates as they gave me good observational feedback, like if I was rocking to much, or not enunciating properly. You can view the different stages of feedback I received. 

Feedback

So now the answer to the driving question which in case you forgot is “How can we use a formal debate to convince an audience we’re right?” The answer is if you are well prepared, well practiced, and have reliable sources and information then you can convince the audience you are in the right. However… if your opponent is more all of those things or slightly more compelling then you might lose. 

 

Thank you for reading this blogpost here is my debate in case you haven’t watched it yet!