The Great Debaters
Coming back from the winter break, I’m writing today about a recent project we completed before the break. This project was called “The Great Debaters” and was about debate. In this project, we would develop and present a formal debate. This was an English based project with little structure in the sense of curriculum. We spent a couple weeks studying debate and learning grammatical and persuasive writing techniques, but we where mostly free to creat what we wanted.
Building Knowledge
To launch this project, we got a brief introduction to the world of debate with a movie. This movie, titled The Great Debaters had an excellent plot and was focused around a highschool debate team. The important features of the story had little to do with the debate content, but the film contained more than enough debate scenes to catch us up to speed and get us exited. We talked a little more about what debate means, and what it would look like for us, and than we were let loose.
First step: polish up our persuasive writing skills. Our prompt was “The Best _____ Ever” pick something to represent the best of it’s kind. The best athlete ever, the best author ever, or the best flower ever. I chose to write about the best season ever. Our teacher told us that we needn’t worry about the topic, so much as the persuasive and formality of our writing. Through this, we learned about parallel structure and simplifying sentance for flowing, concise information. The movie, and this initial warm-up took us around a week, then it was onto the final product.
Final Product
Any project where you have free reign on a topic, makes me kind of nervous. I’m a very indecisive person, so locking in something usually takes me longer than my peers. For this project it was kind of like that, except we need someone to debate against. Someone with the same topic. I teamed up with my classmate and close buddy Sean. Sean and I pick the prompt “Money can’t buy happiness.” We switched it around to “Money can buy happiness” for some reason I can’t remember, and Sean argued the positive, while I took the negative. I said goodbye to my partner/opponent and started researching.
I started with creating “Need to Know’s”, which helped me lay a foundation of what I would further research.
We had this special criteria to validate and format our sources called annotated bibliography. I don’t really know what it means or how it works, and I just kind of did my research. Regardless of my knowledge on the task, I think I did some pretty good research. I found lots of good sources which was really challenging at the start. I took lots of good notes, and I found information on everything I wanted to cover.
After creating the information that would be included in my debate I needed to start creating the debate speech. At this point in time I understood that the format of the presentation would be a four minute speech, one minute rebuttal and a thirty second closing remarks. I know how many drafts and how much revision is necessary for a writing piece of this magnitude. Especially when it’s the only main piece of work for the project. I stuck to the motto of draft early and draft often.
In addition to my speech I knew I was going to have to do a rebuttal. I reviewed my speech looking for any holes in my argument. We talked in class about thinking of what our apponent would be able to say against us. Thinking this way can prepare you for rebuttal and make you more knowledgeable on the topic. As it turns out, my argument was very holy and left me with much room to form great rebuttal points.
Exhibition
We where set to present our debate at our Winter Exhibition. We bring in parents, friends and family to come see our learning. We set a stage, with a podium and lights. There was an argument every 15 minutes. Everybody dressed up, with binders of speeches and notes. The Exhibition was as fun as it usually was. This year was a super cool, because we got to watch all our classmates debates. We had spent most of the project in isolation, just researching and revising. In the debate, I scrutinized my opponent’s statements, marking off specific points in my rebuttal plan. While my speech didn’t meet some of my previous practice attempts, I believe I effectively communicated my thoughts.
I also really loved hearing my opponent and close friend speak the anti to my claim. I liked hearing the points he made that I didn’t think of. He made a very thought out, well organized speech that was easy to follow.
I’m less comfortable with persuasive writing as I am with creative writing, so this was a good challenge for me. I worked on my preparation skills, as well as my ability to think critically on the spot.
Driving Question
“How can we use a formal debate to convince an audience we’re right?”
In a debate, we win people over by using strong evidence, clear reasoning, and persuasive communication. Adding facts, stats, and data makes our points more convincing.
Thank you all for reading, have a wonderful day.
-Declan