Adam's July Post: Speaking Skills

[Adam Webster]

As quite a few of you know, I am a high school English teacher. I also
teach speech and Debate. Teaching Debate requires no special training
beyond an English degree. There's no set curriculum, only a list of
different events in which kids can compete. Anyone who has been
involved in Debate, however, knows that a good teacher can go a long way
in producing a team that performs well. From personal experience, I can
say that a bad teacher can really assure that his or her team never
rises above mediocrity. I would like to be the good teacher. Although
events differ somewhat, all (but one) are judged partially on kids'
abilities as public speakers. So, good speaking skills are a thing I
would like to develop universally among my students.

My question to you is this: what makes someone a good speaker? In other
words, what is the difference between John Kerry and Barack Obama?

[Scott Nesler]

Adam, it is great to know that you are a Debate teacher. Based on
your post at the House of Junto, I would suggest you will be a success
and great role model teaching the subject of debate. I can only
wish my children had the opportunity to be taught by you.

It is not your training in English that sets you apart. It is your
ability to rationally realize the many aspects of an argument, to
respect an unexamined point of view, and to intelligently present
your perspective in a thoughtful manner. From past discussions, I
can tell that you are more interested approaching truth than winning
an argument. It would be nice if sanity could triumph. As a
father, I would rather my boys be a member of a 1 and 9 debate team
seeking the truth than a 10 and 0 team appeasing the judges.

Your focus on public speaking will hopefully provide a catalyst for
increasing the success of the team. Adolph Hitler was a
convincing speaker. Here is a quote of his I noted, "What good
fortune for governments that the people do not think". Please
explain to your students the importance of making the audience
think.

I do not have any big picture thoughts on being a good public speaker,
just one small thought. Barrack Obama, George W Bush, Ronald Reagan,
and Bill Clinton understood how to appeal to the herd.

[Jake Patterson]

As a communication graduate I am trained to be very critical about
someone's public speaking skills. I'm usually pretty harsh. But the
difference between John Kerry and Barack Obama is confidence.

Kerry did not inspire any confidence. He was described over and over
as "wooden," which I think is appropriate. His smile was forced, his
words felt heavy, his body language non existant. Dave Barry wrote
that his main priority if he were elected president would be to
"develop facial expressions."

Obama is light and easy. His words flow and his smile is natural. He
talks with his hands when appropriate and delivers a glow. He's fun
to listen to. He has trained his voice to carry. He sounds
professional. He is also prepared. I have no doubt that Kerry came
prepared to speaking events, but Obama acts like it. Even when he was
stumped, he carried right on with the same attitude and won over the
imaginations of America.

They have some striking similarities, including vagueness in their
campaign promises and proliferant usage of "um." But neither of these
things hurt Obama because he didn't act like they did. "Um" sounds
articulate when he says it. "Change" sounds like a list of
credentials.

I've certainly heard good and bad come from both of them, but that
confident style makes Obama stand out. (I wish we had a recording of
Patrick Henry, because Hitler just doesn't do it for me.)

[Brett Kraus]

Adam, I think you would be a great teacher. I did participate in
Debate and loved my coach. He was a genuinely great guy. I credit him
for getting me through high school without going crazy. There are a
number of things that I think you have to be able to do to be a good
public speaker, at least for debate.

First, being able to play to the judge is not intellectually
dishonest, nor is it a lie. Judges need to hear different things, and
truthfully, they have different concerns. You have to be prepared on
more than one front. For policy people, the older judges, tend to like
strict plans, disads, and counterplans (though often not counterplans
that are too off-base), a few of the younger judges, myself included
when I judged, loved the Kritik (critique). All of these arguments get
you to a similar result, that a person's plan is bad, or for other
events that your position is worth listening too, and that you deserve
to win. The ability to tell people what they need to hear, as long as
it is consistent with what you tell others is important. You need to
know what people want if you are to know how to argue the case to
them, including knowing what arguments you have to raise.

Second, I echo Jake/Paco, you have to exude confidence, whether you
feel it or not. If you want people to believe what you are saying, you
have to believe that they will. A lot of people say you have to
believe in it, that is B.S., although ethically you should only argue
for a position if you agree with it. Confidence only comes from
practice. Mr. Purdie, my debate coach, made us perform at least 2
practice rounds a week. We had to act as judges and timekeepers for
others, but we had to do it. If you want to sound polished, you need
to be polished. You have to put in the time to make it happen.

Third, you need to be prepared. This partly overlaps practice, but it
goes deeper. You have to have actually thought out what you are doing.
The best extemper (person with 30 minutes to prepare a 5-7 minute oral
presentation), had an outline that he followed in every situation, een
for Princeton, the comedic one. For the comedic one, I recall that he
always made it about someone trying to take over the world with an odd
item, whether it be marshmallows, disney action figures, or little cat
figurines. He made the comedic one funny, and the others he was both
funny and informative. He prepared a joke for each round that he would
take the time to work into whatever topic he had been given. He also
read papers and magazines, filing the stories in various locations. He
knew what information we had and where it was, and sometimes didn't
even need it. His pre-tournament preparation gave him plenty of time
to build and practice his oration.

Also, another thing our teacher made us do, which I hated at the time,
but wish I had done more, was spend the first 5-10 minutes of every
class working on elocution. People can't agree with what they cannot
understand. Also, the process of speaking correctly and clearly make
people want to listen to you, because they enjoy hearing your voice
(think Liam Neeson, James Earl Jones, and others). This is especially
important in policy where your goal is to "spew" out as many arguments
in your given timeframe as possible, in as quick a voice as you can.
You have to be able to be understood or your judge will not listen.

The last part of preparation is for LD/Policy. You have to know what
the arguments you are going to hear are. You then prepare your first
line of defense. We had cards devoted to debunking what we thought
were the best arguments against our case, we also had canned arguments
we planned to use against the cases and arguments we anticipated. It
saved us taking any preparation time after they gave their first
argument and allowed us to just push forward, with good answers. We
had to prepare some of these as homework for LD (my highschool debate
event), and it was a big part of our collegiate course, preparing
these answers. Every once in a while you hear a seemingly new
argument, but most of those are either not very good, are derivative
of other arguments you know, are so far off base that you can dismiss
them with a laugh, or are good arguments, but since you know your
argument so well, you can come up with a logical argument to prevent
them from really doing much harm.

There was one time when I sabatoged myself with just running the
preparation route, however, without improvising. In a debate
tournament about racial discrimination, we argued that past
preferences for white people made it harder for minority groups to
break through the barriers. This kind of white privilege makes the
road harder for minorities. As part of our C/X in a finals, we engaged
the other team in a discussion of this "white privilege" which led me
to ask a minority member if he knew about white privilige, to which he
replies, in his best southern slave accent, "why yes suh, I do." The
room bust up laughing and the only person who voted for us was a Black
judge, who actually agreed with our argument. Talking to the other
team, they agreed with our argument too, and he said his making look
dumb was his winning strategy to beat us. I got so flustered, that I
forgot my follow-up question about why he was trying to extend that
same privilege in another area. So I guess along with preparation,
teach them to be able to improvise. Doing impromptu helps with that.

The kids have to do most of the work, but you can guide them. By the
way, if you come up to Logan for a tournament, so long as I do not
have a real trial, I would love to still judge either Policy, LD, or
extemp.