Hello everyone and welcome back to another blog post! I am writing this at the end of winter break as this is a post on our most recent project which was displayed at the Winter Exhibition 2023. For Grade 11, we prepared debates and rebuttals which we performed live for an audience. This was a super fun project and I learned so much. I would say this is in my Top 5 favourite projects of all my time in PLP. In this post I will be taking you through the ups and downs of this project. Enjoy!

To start off, we wrote a paragraph with the prompt “The best ___ ever”. So I decided to write about potatoes being the best vegetable ever. We would come back to this paragraph many times over the course of this project to apply new skills and writing techniques that we would learn. This was a really good starting place because it let me see what I could do and what I needed to work on. To be honest, I really like the piece of writing that I did and I think it’s pretty funny. It’s an unserious topic but eventually we had to practice presenting it seriously which I found entertaining. Anyway, below you can see all off the different drafts where I applied everything that I learned along the way ⬇️ 

Next, we started our actual project. My debate partner and I went through many topics before we finally decided on “social media does more harm than good”. I was debating in the affirmative, that social media does more harm than good. I spent a lot of time researching it and thankfully it paid off. I chose to put an anecdote on Amanda Todd in my final speech. It was heart-wrenching to research about her, but at the same time very interesting. I think it was a good connection to my audience as it did happen here in Greater Vancouver. During this process, I learned about how important it is to properly organize your research. I did a horrible job and it made it very, very, very hard to find specific information. In the future, I will definitely be taking more time to organize my research more thoroughly. You can see my questionably organized research here.

Next up, it was time to start actually writing our debates. My blood, sweat, and tears went into this speech. The amount of time I spent revising it was insane but was worth it. I’m very proud of what I ended up writing. Because I had my potato paragraph, I  practiced the writing techniques that I put into my final speech so I was pretty good at them. My favourite technique that I learned was parallel structure. At the beginning of the project, we had some Grade 12s come in and present debates that they had been working on. That’s when I first noticed how influential parallel structure can be in writing. Below, you can see all the drafts of my writing and my final piece ⬇️ 

You can see all the feedback I gave here

You can see all the other feedback I received here

Then, we started our rebuttals. Because we were debating live, we didn’t know exactly what our opponent was going to say. So we had to put ourselves in their shoes and guess what they were going to say. Because my topic was pretty generic, it was easy to guess what Max was going to say. So I came up with around 8 points that I thought he could say and I wrote short responses to them. Thankfully he said at least two of my points which I was able to present. Something I learned is that it’s better to be over prepared then under prepared. Some of my classmates decided to just wing their rebuttal on the stand and I had to watch a few of them. Unfortunately, that didn’t end up very well for them and I am very thankful that I over-prepared. You can see my rebuttal prep here.

Finally, it was time to present. Over the course of this project, we practiced our presenting skills through multiple different small activities. However, our live debate was the final debate. I  thought that I was a good public presenter at the start of this project, but looking at my improvement through the project it was clear that I had a lot of work to do and still do. I learned that there’s a big difference between reading out loud and presenting a piece of writing. I learned the importance of emphasizing words and how important pacing is when you’re talking. As well it’s important to have confidence when speaking. Below, you can see my final debate where I tried to use everything I had learned through the project ⬇️ 

Thanks for reading!

Best wishes,

Dana