How can we use a formal debate to convince an audience we’re right?

When I heard that we were starting a debate unit my first thoughts were “I’m going to have to speak in PUBLIC? Noooooooooooooooooo!” But throughout the project I actually had a lot of fun and surprised myself.

To start the project off we watched the movie The Great Debaters and if you have seen the movie you will know that their teacher has them practice speaking with a cork 🍾 in their mouths. While this movie was very interesting to watch and got us in the debating mindset, I was very glad that we never had to do that (it was offered though). I enjoyed the movie because I never have been interested in debate so I felt like this introduced our class to what we would be doing. 

Now that we were in the debating mindset, we needed to practice using persuasive writing. “The Best _____ Ever” was our prompt and I chose to do the best sport (which you all should know is volleyball!!!!!!!). Here is the link to all the different versions I made including the one where I had to identify logos, pathos, and ethos as well as the one where I had to rewrite to add parallel structure. Parallel structure was the format we were going to use in our debates so we practiced with this writing skill. Interestingly, I found that my writing actually showed several parallel structures already which gave me hope for my debate. 

Then we got to pick our topic and nemesis (opponent). My friend Ava and I had already decided to go against each other so as soon as we got the list of possible topic we started highlighting. We went through the list crossing off things we didn’t want to do (basically anything to do with money and school) and highlighting all the ones we would want to try to debate (this was a long list of everything else). Eventually we narrowed it down to multiple serious topics and one fun one. We found that most people were doing serious topics since it was going to be a serious debate, so we picked the opposite (the fun one:) ) to challenge ourselves to turn a fun topic into a serious debate. We chose “Super Villains are Better Then Super Heroes”.

Once we chose our topic we begun researching which allowed me to show growth in my questioning competency. I chose the affirmative side of the statement and because we weren’t supposed to know our opponent’s arguments, the affirmative and negative were put on different sides of the classroom. One engaging part of this project was how my opponent/nemesis/Ava and I made the competition entertaining. For example, you can see from the title of this blog that we would find creative, and fun names for our documents. Other examples are the title of my Need To Knows and the tittle of my Research. For our debates we were told to find lots of research and put it in the form of an annotated bibliography. The trickiest part of this process was finding sources about Super Villains that met all the reliability requirements. We needed at least three reasons why each source was reliable before we could use it (if it was made recently or maybe its a university paper) and there aren’t many research papers from universities about Super Villains. This is one part that definitely showed my researching growth and how I had to change which criteria I was using. Instead of trying to find university studies,  I found articles written by reliable authors with jobs like psychologists and others that made sense with my topic. 

Now that I had the research I wrote the actual debate. We broke the debate speech into three parts:

1. The 4 minute opening with most of the research and arguments. 

2. The 1 minute rebuttal which was our reply to our opponent’s arguments. 

3. The 30 seconds closing remarks.

I think the was the hardest part for me was writing the opening 4 minutes as I had lots of ideas but found that…. It might have been too many ideas. My first draft was about 9 minutes….. it took me a long time to cut it down to the four minutes. During this process no matter what people said when I asked them what I should cut I would always keep a certain part. That part was “Are you trying to decide between blond, or brunette? Cruella Deville shows us that you don’t have to decide – make a statement, go for both.“ I don’t know why, but I loved that part and I wouldn’t get rid of it. Eventually with lots of feedback and edits I had a draft that I was excited to present.  Next was the rebuttal. We got many rebuttal examples so when it came to writing mine it wasn’t as hard as writing my 4 minute speech. What I did find hard was knowing that Ava was going to think of some abstract and not obvious point, that I didn’t know, so I couldn’t prepared for it. Then I wrote my conclusion (that I threw out the window during my debate so it doesn’t matter what I originally wrote). 

I grew in my communication competency in the practicing and presenting of the debate. Before I tell you how I am proud of how the debate went, you should understand that public speaking has never been my strong suit so I was pretty nervous going into this project. The feeling of not wanting to talk in front of people got worse when I came early one day to practice in front of of Ms Madsen, my teacher. It didn’t go terrible but I could’ve done better and it didn’t instil me with confidence and nether did the practice later that week in front of her in class. I did practice a lot in front of friends and (what I found very helpful) in front of my whole family but I was still very nervous.

Exhibition day!!!!!!!!!!!!

This was it where all my hard work hopefully was going to come together. I watched multiple people debate (which I found helpful for my own) and saw part of the other PLP students’ work (though not as much as I would’ve liked). Then it was my turn; Ava and I both did really well. A few things I am especially proud: I didn’t speak too quickly which is a tendency of mine when I speak publicly, I used my research to make up an appropriate rebuttal in the moment, and I completely redid my conclusion while talking. What I found surprising was how Ava took a shot at my argument in the conclusion (it was a smart move to be honest) but I definitely wasn’t expecting that. She also made a lot of points that I wasn’t expecting making it challenging for me to rebut her. 

In the end, I did win the debate which might have had something to do with 6 of the audience members being related, but overall, I was very proud of how I did and I loved having Ava as an opponent/nemesis. The experience was fun and challenging. I found that I surprised myself in how I spoke in my debate and even though I need to work on annunciation I was glad I didn’t just speed through all my writing. I really enjoyed communicating in this different format, as it was something I hadn’t tried before and I found it very enjoyable. Overall I enjoyed this project and I hope you look below and watch my debate as well as the debates of my other classmates.