I don’t have a formal or even a really organized response to this explosion of speaking. What can you say? The easy way out is to say it’s not a debate, it’s a failed debate, and to leave it at that. Another easy way to respond is to create some way to determine a winner…

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In a few minutes the first part of the 20 deep Democratic debate will start. There’s no shortage of ways you can watch this event, think about it or talk about it, but most of the commentary and interpretation of it will attempt to limit how it can be seen. Debate is a hot issue…

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Interesting piece in the March 26th Bloomberg Businessweek about disrupting the US admissions test industry. The question is begged: Why are we preparing people for work? Why is this the metric? Most of us professors, I hope, are not interested in preparing people for a “life of work” but “a life of which work will…

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I had no idea what to make of the new Taylor Swift video because I am a middle aged white dude who spends a lot of time thinking and talking about video games and books. So this text went right by me. I still really don’t have a handle on what it’s supposed to mean.…

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I showed this video to the argumentation class that I took over for the last 6 weeks. This was shown (well most of it) just after everyone had done some in-class debates. One of the biggest goals I have in teaching debate and argumentation is to address fact addiction. Students strongly believe that access to…

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After this week it seems clear that it’s time for a reboot of the National Communication Association. I’ve been attending the National Communication Association conference and looking at the journals from it since 2002 when I started graduate studies in rhetoric. Since then, I’ve found the NCA convention to be incredibly valuable. I find it…

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Check out this excellent piece by Lance Richardson on the difficulties of digging through the hard drives and digital files of Peter Matthiessen. Apparently he had over 39,000 files on one flash drive. As someone who is madly in love with flash drives and someone who admires Peter Matthiessen greatly, this piece could not have…

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When a veteran rhetorical scholar chooses to make a case you’d expect it to be very difficult to critique, or at least very well constructed, using all of the arts that they study in such a way to make the criticism of it difficult or tricky. But in this case perhaps the mechanisms of gatekeeping…

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Spring term was a bit bumpy for me as I took on teaching online public speaking for the first time and took over an argumentation course for a colleague who had to be out for a time for surgery. Both experiences were educational for me. I hope the students learned things too. Most of them…

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I still regularly hear that people continue to say that I am against competitive debate. I am not. All debate is competitive, by definition. A debater is trying to sway an audience to their side, or at least, away from the side of the opponent (Yes, everywhere else but intercollegiate tournament debating, “critique without alternative”…

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