Hello and welcome back to my blog. Today’s post is all about debate. Now, going into this project, I was feeling pretty confident. With four siblings and a massive extended family, you could say I had some experience under my belt. However, as this project was unveiled, I discovered that my dinner table debating experience wasn’t going to come in super handy in regards to the formal academic style of debate. We’ll get into the specifics of what exactly that is later on in this post.
To begin this project, Ms Madsen showed us a movie to inspire us to tackle the work ahead. This movie is called The Great Debaters, and it definitely gave me a better sense of what an actual debate looks like. After watching The Great Debaters, our class was witness to the PLP 12’s speech project. We had to assess the proficiency of the grade 12’s speeches and ultimately decide who had the best one.
Listening to the grade 12’s helped me get a sense of what makes a good speaker. I learned how tone, pace, and clarity, truly make all the difference in a speaker.
To brush up on our persuasive writing skills, we had to write an 8-10 sentence paragraph on this prompt:
The greatest ________ ever.
To challenge myself, I decided to write about how Groundhog Day is the best holiday ever. Did I actual believe this statement or know anything about Groundhog Day? Absolutely not, but it made it more entertaining to write.
Using this piece of writing, we started thinking about the use of pathos and logos again. We annotated our writing, looking for pathos, facts, and opinions.
After that, we learned about substantiating your writing, which essentially means backing up your claims.
Once my writing was substantiated, I handed in a pretty dang- convincing final draft of why Groundhog Day is the superior holiday.
Throughout the project, we had also been thinking about what we would possibly want to debate in the exhibition. I decided to find a partner first, than pick a topic together. Alicia and I were keen to debate each other, and the topic we landed on was:
“Media are more powerful than the government”
I took the affirmative in this debate, arguing that media is more powerful than the government. Alicia took the negative, arguing the opposite.
After this came the research. As we all know, there is a ton of misinformation on the internet, so we learned about trustworthy sources to use in our debates. To show our source’s credibility, we made an annotated bibliography, with 3 websites listed, bullet points from their information, and an evaluation on why it’s a credible source.
Click on image to read about my sources:
Using this research, it was time to make a first draft of our speeches. The debate format was as follows:
1. Affirmative Speech (4min)
2. Negative Speech (4min)
3. Negative Gives Rebuttal (1min)
4. Affermative Gives Rebuttal (1min)
5. Negative Closing Remarks (30s)
6. Affermative Closing Remarks (30s)
I knew I wanted to mentions these bullet points in my speech, but through my first drafts, I found I struggled to mention them all and keep it 4 minutes. I ended up focusing more on the first two, and briefly mentioning the others.
My first draft was revised countless times through peer and teacher feedback. Throughout the writing process I found that using an anecdotal introduction was the best option for me, and I called on the case of the Arab Spring.
Once I had a draft that was semi-sensical, I got to work on rehearsing it. Public speaking, it turns out, isn’t just reading from a page and making occasional eye-contact. When rehearsing with Dana and Ms. Madsen, I realized that I had good pacing and pronunciation, but sounded like an emotionless robot. Through a few weeks of working on my monotone reading, emphasis, and pauses, I think my speaking greatly improved, along with the final draft of my speech.
After my speech was done, I got to work on developing my rebuttals.
I ended up with 3 scripted rebuttals and some general ideas of what I thought Alicia was going to say. I was really hoping she would mention my rebuttal points because the thought of making a rebuttal on the spot was terrifying to me.
Once I had developed my rebuttals, I prepared my 30 second closing remarks, which briefly summarized my points.
Then, came the day of the exhibition. We got lucky this year and had surprisingly minimal setup. We agreed as a class that we didn’t need much decor around the room and wanted to keep the focus on the speakers.
While preparing for the exhibition, Dana, Hannah, and I, volunteered to be responsible for the food for our grade’s room. We decided on cookies for people waiting to watch a debate and we got to work making 200 sugar coookies with very vibrant icing. I also got some free scones from Cobs to go with the cookies.
Luckily, Alicia and I were up second to debate. Leading up to the debate I was definitely nervous, but felt well-prepared and confident in my argument. Dana and I rehearsed so much to each other that we practically knew our own, and each other’s, speeches by heart.
Here is how the debate went down:
(Shoutout to Fraser for compiling and posting all the debates!)
All in all, I’m proud of how we both did in the debate. Alicia proved to be a worthy opponent, and had me nervous during the rebuttal. I think my rebuttal could have been more effective if I had stuck to one point, instead of rushing two and getting cut off.
In the end, I had one more vote than Alicia (perks of having a big family…🤫)
Overall, I really enjoyed this project. I found I was really into learning about and preparing for debating, and the content was the perfect level of challenging for me. This project has left me interested in exploring persuasive writing and spoken language further.
Well that’s all from me! Hope you enjoyed this post about our 2023 Winter Exhbition project. Thanks for reading 👩🏫
Sincerely,
Me
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