| Subject: Wars (of words) not make one great... |
Author:
Paul Musgrave
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Date Posted: 01:37:18 05/21/02 Tue
In reply to:
sibo
's message, "not safe anymore" on 19:19:04 05/20/02 Mon
Many thanks on the ego-boosting comments...I will now expand on my previous arguments:
1)Extemp is more useful
a)The style of speaking in Extemporaneous categories (Extemp Comm, FX, USX, and even Impromptu) is more prevalent in nearly every type of "real-world" rhetorical situation I can think of. The Kennedy-Nixon debate is a perfect example. While Nixon argued debate-style point-by-point, Kennedy argued extemp-style. In the real world, signalling is frequently more persuasive than substance. Extemp will always trump policy on presentation. Surprisingly, I also believe Extemp trumps OO/Dec on presentation as well. Why? Because in the real world, you never ever get a chance to polish a speech as much as you do in OO competition. Extemp encourages a ritualized method of preparation and pre-preparation which focuses the brain and sharpens the wit. OO encourages stagnation.
b)The difference between Exemp and Policy research is two-fold.
i) In Extemp, you read differently. First, you read articles as a whole, not ad seriatim as cards. For example, there was a Khalizad '95 card that served me well for four years as an impact; I have never seen the entire article (nor do I want to). Had I used that article in Extemp, however, I would have had to read the entire thing, thereby learning quite a bit more. Second, you actually have to read the entire article (if you're a good little extemper) whereas I assume that you still have entire files in your policy boxes that you've never read. The "research" for policy might as well be called archiving, because so much of it is glanced at, catalogued, and stored away.
ii)Second, and related to the previous subpoint, the articles filed in Extemp should be of higher quality than cards filed in Debate. Unlike Debate, in Extemp you don't have a set position to defend; therefore your position and reasoning can be more flexible. When I did Policy, I cited Heritage, Cato, and Hudson. I would never do so in an Extemp round, because I needed higher-quality cites to prove my point.
c) FX/USX/ExComm/Imp forces you to know a little to a lot about a great many things. Specialization in an academic area is fine; however, that comes later in the pedagogical process, after years of survey courses and more general reading. How can you effectively research the Great Depression if you're ignorant of U.S. policies in the 1920s, or understand Theodore Roosevelt's importance if you never learned about the Gilded Age? Further, and related to points made above, in the academic world (which I assume we're discussing here) the type of research one reads and produces more closesly resembles Extemp than Debate. Pick up a scholarly journal sometime: the articles are longer and far more boring, but they are not as sensational as the worst of Debate. In their commitment to evenhandedness and their avoidance of biased evidence, scholars (real scholars) would find the more leisured and less rigid world of Extemp far more congenial than the bitter and destructively competitive world of Debate.
2) Breadth over depth
To reiterate, specialization is fine. But the specialization one finds in debate is artificial, enforced by the resolution, rather than an organic specialization arising from a scholar's curiosity and interest. Further, again, specialization in the "real world" appears after an apprenticeship period that lasts longer than an entire high school debate career. Extemp is a valuable part of that apprenticeship because when properly done it teaches about a wide variety of interesting and controversial topics, as well as introducing competitors to quality journals, magazines, and newspapers. (Debate is a valuable part too, by teaching about a wide variety of issues within a given subject area, but it is less so than Extemp. My charge is not to prove Debate worthless, just to show it is less useful than Extemp.)
The idea of a liberal arts education is that one should have exposure to more than just narrow technicalities. All too often, debates can turn on theoretical arguments with precisely zero educational value. Extemp, while seemingly more superficial, is more educational and hence "better" for my purposes than Debate because of its breadth of coverage and the positive impacts of extemp-style rhetoric compared with policy-style discourse.
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