Being Really Extra Dramatic in DIs

I just practiced my DI about 30 minutes ago. My throat still hurts. Also, I just cut stuff from it, so I was "practicing" it by sitting down and reading the script straight off my computer. And then I realized I was hitting my desk really hard on the angry lines and then I stopped doing that. Yet somehow it felt really good.

We like knowing we can get into character, I guess. We can be angry when we want. We can bring tears into our own eyes on occasion. We can even recover quickly and thank the judges for timing, and that is a valuable skill.

How often do you see a DI that just isn't dramatic at all? It's quite infrequent. I mean, it happens, but not every day. Even pieces entered as DIs that are more OI in nature are still dramatic. It seems to me that far more often we'll see a DI that is reallly dramatic. Sometimes the drama is fitting. Sometimes it's way over-the-top. That's just how interpers are. We like being really extra dramatic in DIs. We like being really extra dramatic all the time!

If you're in speech and debate, the odds are good that you like being in the spotlight. You like people staring at you. You like jumping on a big stage by yourself. If you're in DI, then for some reason, you even get a kick out of dying from time to time, and that's totally ok. How often do you get to die or hurt somebody? How often do you get to scream as you're being tortured? How often do you get to pour your heart and soul into a anger-filled monologue while three moms watch with tears in their eyes?

For us, all the time. We love it.

Just let it out, man. Let it out. Sometimes one of your multiple personalities characters has something to say and they've just got to scream it really super dramatically. And we like it that way.

You're homeschooled.
*sniff*

Having A 10 Minute Speech

I'm not good with time. I mean, if I look at a clock, I can tell you what time it is; that's not an issue. What I'm not good at is looking at a script and telling you how long it is. Or whenever I think I'm right, I'm wrong. Or whenever I time an interp or platform, and the timer says ten minutes, it's actually not. In competition it will be 11. Which is, you know, fantastic.

So then it's back to the drawing board, or word-processing program, as the case may be. It is time to cut. So I cut and cut and cut and cut and cut. I then do one of two things: I will either read everything I have cut in succession to determine how long it took me to read, and assume that that time is the approximate amount of seconds I just shaved off this speech. Alternatively, I may calculate my words-per-minute reading rate, add up the amount of words I cut, and go from there. If I want to be really sure I've cut enough, I do both. This is the process I followed with a recent DI that was going much, much too long. I estimated a 45-second decrease in time based on my two experiments.

Naturally, the dang speech just got longer.

Timing is hard. I should also mention that I have never, ever had a speech that was too ridiculously short. Oh, except once. My first interp I ever gave was, like, 7:30. But it didn't really make sense. So I added stuff. A few short weeks later, it was up 3 minutes. Like I said, I hardly ever have luck with time. I feel bad. I get why judges rank me down for it. It's not fair of me to take up a bunch of extra time that other people could have been putting to good use if they went over time. Please forgive me, other people. And judges.

That's why it's so great when you have a speech that's an even 10. Or close to an even 10. Some people get away with 11:00. Some people break with 8:05. Some people win tournaments with 13 minute interps, or so I've heard. But those people are weird and not normal, and are certainly not me.

Having a ten minute interp or platform is an often-eluding goal. But man, it feels good when you get there. It feels awesome to hear the high-pitched voice of an adorable timer tell you everything's all right. Then you can live in peace until the next pattern.

You're homeschooled. Time's up.

Debating Against Your Friends

I like my friends. Obviously. That's why I'm friends with them.
Also I like debate. Put the two together and it's like, whoah! awesome! Debating with friends is fun. Last  Monday, I, in an extreme lapse of sanity, agreed to debate my good friend in LD despite the fact that I had never before done LD. But you know what? It was fun. I'm glad I did it. Everything's more fun with friends.

Recently I found my first flowpad from back in the ancient days when I had only been doing TP for like a week. It's amazing comparing it to the flowpad I use now. So much has changed since then. The pens I used then are out of ink (though I still keep forgetting the green one is), I can actually do a 1AR that's five minutes, I know the meaning of fancy terms like "affirmative," "harms," "timer" and "running permutation on non-mutually exclusive counter-plans." But you know what hasn't changed in the numerous months since my uber-novice days? On both my first flowpad and the one I'm using now, admittedly my... second, one consistent theme is that I often debate my friends.

Sometimes they kill me. I mean, not literally, and they're nice about it and all, but I'm pretty dead by the end of it. I guess that's what happens when you have 3 teams in your club who are some of the top teams in the nation and your coach makes you debate two of them the summer before you officially even start in Policy and then the other team very shortly after because you'll apparently learn something. We had fun, but man. I had no idea what the heck was going on. Cross-Ex was a nightmare. But then my friends would always hug me afterwards and sometimes tell me all about the flaws in their arguments so I could attempt to, I don't know, metaphorically poke them next time while they ruthlessly claw at my responses and then unrepentantly destroy them until they no one even remembers they exist. And then hug me.

The great thing about debating friends, though, is that they're fun about it afterwards. Sometimes you debate acquaintances, and you're not sure how you're supposed to feel about them afterwards, so you're nice, of course, but it can get a bit awkward. Sometimes you debate people you've never met or even seen before, and you're not sure if you're all of a sudden supposed to be friends or if you should keep pretending like you've never met, because, if you want to get super technical, you probably haven't. But when you're with friends, even if you don't like them very much during the course of the round, you know you can act like everything's great afterwards.

I love debating friends who, immediately after the round, pretend like it didn't happen. Let's pretend we weren't just arguing. Let's pretend I wasn't attempting to rip your arguments to shreds or attack your credibility with various evidence indicts. Let's pretend I didn't take a careful flow of the 1AC so I can tell everyone in my club about it later. Let's just be friends again. That would be awesome.

So you are. And you laugh and joke and at the next tournament, someone will say, "That was such a fun round, but I still don't know how we won."
"Wait, seriously? You guys so deserved that!"
"No way! You two are great! And-"

And life goes on.

You're homeschooled. No dispute there.

When Your Friends are Community Judges and Love It

You should've seen my church on the Sunday before last. It's not a very big church. It would probably not be an exaggeration to say that 75% of the adults at my church were judges at our recent-est, local-est tournament. Which was awesome.

They were all discussing their experiences before and after the sermon. One judge told me about his Apologetics adventures. He thought the first speaker had a pretty good idea of giving three points within his speech. It didn't take him long to realize that that was what everyone does. Suddenly it was a lot less impressive. He also was annoyed by long introductions and wished that kids would just state their topics right away so he could cross it off the secret judge topic list. But I had to explain that most judges like flowery intros.


He had fun judging LD too. Yet he was startled, because he had been told in orientation that he shouldn't say anything during the round. And then, right before it started, someone asked him if he had any judging philosophy or anything he would like to see or not see during the round. He wasn't sure if he should answer, but he told them that this was his first time and he wanted them to make things simple for him. Then he noticed that both kids were reading their cases they had already written, and figured they weren't bothering to change anything. He was determined to give them something sneaky and nefarious next year to see if they would do it, like "I want you to end all of your speeches by explaining why your opponent should win." I told him that probably wouldn't fly.


It was definitely interesting hearing what everyone thought and who they judged. A lot of them had a lot of big-name speakers and debaters, who they were happy to hear ended up in finals or out rounds. It was also fun hearing one man explain Parli to another and two guys trying to express to someone else the awkwardness of Cross-Ex ("They would look at me, and then talk to the other person. So they're making eye contact with me, but they're not talking to me. It was so weird!"). I talked to my aunt about OOs she saw, and was happy to hear that she ranked my friends pretty high. All-in-all, Sunday was fun. They finally got to see what I partake in all the time and maybe understand why I'm so addicted.


Finding community judges is hard. How many people have a few spare hours lying around on a weekday, or feel like spending Saturday at some school or church somewhere with a bunch of teenagers? Only the awesome people. We love those guys. And really, we're doing them a favor. They always love it, right? They always want to come back. Your job is just that much easier next time around.


You're homeschooled. Thank you for judging.

Taking Forever To Fully Recover From a Tournament

I didn't debate last year. I just speech-ed. That meant a significantly less amount of early mornings and late nights than I have experienced this year. My mom attempted to talk me out of debating so that those early mornings and late nights would be less likely to occur, but it was to no avail. Yes sir, now I have experienced my fair share of early mornings and late nights at tournaments. It's not that we stay up and party at tournaments. No, we stay up and argue with each other. It's way less cool.

You know that moment at a tournament where it just hits you how tired you are? Maybe it's when you look over at your partner before the 2NR when there's 1:40 left on the prep time clock and ask what his responses are and he stares at you like you're crazy and says, "This is your speech." Maybe it's at 11:30 PM when you're crawling into bed wondering if you remembered to give all of your speeches in Pattern B or if you forgot one or two so you stay awake thinking about it for another 45 minutes or so. Maybe it's when the tournament was running a bit behind or something, and for whatever reason they decided to post when you haven't even given all your IEs from the last pattern yet, so you hurry up and do those and then run over to your room only to find out that SURPRISE! there's a class going on in there and they have to relocate you, so you wait outside for 15 minutes for your partner and the judge and the tournament people and then you carry all of your stuff down several flights of stairs and way over to the big, smelly gym where you set up shop and get ready to go Neg against what proves to be Abolish the Death Tax for the twelveteenth time and just as you finish the Disads you had virtually memorized in the 2NC, you sit down and then the other team yells at you and you're like, "What? Oh yea, Cross-Ex. I forgot about that." Not that that happened to me the 4th round of the last tournament. (Was it 4th? It might have been 6th. I don't remember. I don't even think I knew at the time.)

But then, that sneaky tournament is almost over. And you're like, Whoa. It's Saturday? Where did that come from? And then it's the awards ceremony and you half-heartedly clap for ten-hundred people. Then it's over. You vaguely remember your friend winning... something. And you glance at your hands to discover that you somehow came out with a trophy and then notice several medals around your neck and you're not sure how either of those shiny things got there. Your mom asks you what place you got in ____ and you have no idea and tell her to check speechranks in a couple days.

Then comes the good part. You go home and sleeep and sleeeep and sleepandsleepandsleep. For days. Weeks even. You take like nine days off from thinking about speech and debate (except for a few hours Monday night) and try to get caught up on your homework. Because, seriously. The next tournament is in, what? Two weeks? You've got all the time in the world to recover from the last one.

hahaha. Yea right.

You're homeschooled and takin' it easy.

How to Explain Debate To Outsiders

I enjoy talking to my non-speech and debate friends about speech and debate, and I appreciate that they are willing to listen and feign interest. They get interps because they've seen me do a bunch of them. They get impromptu because it's a fairly simple concept, even if they don't know why anyone would ever do it ever. They get platforms because everyone knows what a platform speech is even if they don't know the technical terms. I rarely try to explain Apologetics or Extemp. But this year I started debate, and that, sir, is a whole different ballgame. I have attempted to explain debate to people many times. Sometimes they are smart and realize that they should just pretend like they understand so I stop trying to explain it. Sometimes, they actually get it.

My explanations of Team Policy debate back when I was a non-debater went something like this:

First off, there's this thing called the Resolution. It tells you what they're debating about. So like, if the Resolution said, hypothetically, that we should reform our revenue generation policies, than the Affirmative team would come up with a Plan that reforms a revenue generation policy or two and then roll with that. But then, the other team, called the Negative, gets up and says "No, no, no, no! Stick with the stuff you know! It is better by far to keep things as they are. Don't mess with the flow, no, no! Stick to the Status Quo!" And then the Affirmative has to talk again about why their plan is good. It's not as hard as it sounds. Well, it sort of is. But you get the idea.

Except they usually didn't get the idea. So I try something less ramble-y and more professional now that I actually debate:

Ok, let's try something less ramble-y and more professional. Basically, we have a, um, topic that they give us that we need to debate about. So the affirmative first team stands up and gives arguments and a plan that the government should do, and then the second team argues against them and they go back and forth for 8 speeches. It's fun.

They can usually understand all of that except the last sentence.
But just in case it doesn't click, try this:

Ok, so, there's one team that argues something and then the other team disagrees with everything they say.

Debate in a nutshell, people. Let's pretend that Counter-Plans don't exist, and that no one cares if they're Topical or not. It's best to avoid any mentions of theory, speaker points, timers, flowpads, breaks, records, stock issues, and judges that fall asleep mid-round when trying to portray our little sport to those who have no clue what you mean as it is.

LD is a little easier.
One person argues with another person against what they should like better.

Boom. You're welcome.

You're homeschooled. I hope that makes sense.