| Subject: moo |
Author:
sibo
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Date Posted: 10:37:30 05/21/02 Tue
In reply to:
Paul Musgrave
's message, "Wars (of words) not make one great..." on 01:37:18 05/21/02 Tue
Yes, I indeed did trigger Paul. Ah well.
1)
A)"Extemp will always trump policy on presentation"- How so? In order to be a good debater, one must not only have substance and analysis, but must present this substance in an easy-to-understand fashion. The job of a debater is to be able to present information for one side of a resolution in a clear comprehensible way that can not only win over hardcore debate judges, but also parent judges or bus driver judges. As previously noted, the top debaters often excel at extemp.
Moreover, most "real-world" rhetorical situations are not presented extemp style. School Board meetings are chock-full of minidebates. Any "debate" in real life uses point by point refutation, whether it be in a class discussion or an online forum *cough*. The only real-world situation that extemp has helped me that debate couldn't would be writing DBQs for the World History AP test. Thanks FX. But AP exams do not provide enough of an advantage to justify placing extemp style speaking over debate style speaking.
And as a side note, the "perfect example" of the Kennedy-Nixon debate would actually favor debate over extemp style speaking. Although Kennedy won according to television viewers, radio listeners gave the up to Nixon. Obviously, television viewers could have been swayed by Nixon's drab appearance and Kennedy's (seemingly) boundless youth. When focusing on the speaking itself, the radio listeners preferred debate style speaking.
B)
i) Eek. Ok, I guess I'm an out-of-date debater. I still read books to find the vast majority of my cards. Point taken.
ii) Higher-quality cites? What defines a poor cite? Perhaps a poor cite is one that is unjustly biased, as in the case of Heritage or Cato. That means that a good cite would be one that was impartial. That's why I was under the (either "post-Paul" or "wrong") impression that cites in extemp should not be opinionated for the most part, but rather just facts. Then, impacting these facts would be done mostly be the extempers own words. Well, debaters use these impartial cites in many cases as well. Maybe not all cases, but the most effective rebuttals are built upon facts and personal impact, not appeal to biased authority.
Anyhow, how is it more useful to work with higher-quality cites? Either way, one learns to use cites and present them in an effective way. A debater could, if provided with a 'high-quality' cite, use that cite just as well as he/she could a poor cite.
c) breadth over depth: Ok, it is difficult to say that one beats the other...neither one is effective w/o the other. It is like Maslow's heirarchy, where the basic needs of life, food, and shelter are necessary, but not more important than the higher need of love. Life means nothing without love, but love is short-lived without basic needs. Likewise, the wide knowledge attained through filing for extemp helps develop a specialization, but does not actually help the specialization process; debate helps specialize knowledge, but does not help in finding a specialization, and is indeed lacking w/o background knowledge of an area through a liberal arts education. So, breadth does not trump depth...but depth does not trump breadth either. Note that I am not trying to claim that extemp and debate are equal and must coexist, simply that the knowledge of issues studied in either event cannot be weighed against the other in an impartial manner. Thus, the issue of which forensics event is better must be settled by the knowledge of speaking that is attained through competition.
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