This recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education tells a story as to how a professor realized that it is ok to say that she doesn’t know the answer to a question, or that she might be uncertain about something a student has said in class. My response is quite simply disappointment that this…

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This New York Times article about Robin Williams’s habits of preparation for engagement with audiences raises a lot of interesting ideas when rhetoricians talk about invention – the art of coming up with what to say, or as I like to call it “putting something together.” I often talk about argument construction in terms of…

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How do most debate coaches teach the canon of inventio? By pointing toward tournament success. By showing videos of good, successful speeches. By having students watch and learn from those who have won big tournaments. By getting them to read, or cut, or memorize the sources of the arguments that the winners have run. Well,…

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Why is there no official, or even pedagogical statement on the value of switch side debating from either the NDT, CEDA, or any other large debating organization? Perhaps it is because switch-side debating is a cover for teaching conviction and engaging in truth-seeking, something that debate can clearly be used for, but is not debate…

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Debate pedagogy’s primary contribution to the study of rhetoric and argumentation is in the realm of invention – how do we come up with and produce argumentation that both addresses the issue at hand and includes, invites, and engages the audience to consider that argumentation? Sadly, this contribution is currently ignored. I learned I have…

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Debate camp in the United States was a large mainstay for many years. It still continues, mostly in edited form, across the country. The major reason that debate camps dried up in the early 2000s was mostly due to funding. When schools no longer have the money to subsidize attendance at debating summer camps, they…

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The conference ended yesterday, and I believe it lives up to all of the hype. The papers were excellent, and so were the questions in the discussions. Serious people attend this thing, and it is a great time. There are a lot of advantages to the way this conference is scheduled that other academic conferences…

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Here are some of my thoughts after day 1: Frans van Eemeren presented the first of three keynotes, where he divided argument studies into three sections  in order to take stock of argument studies – empericism, context, and formality. Empiricism is necessary for the development of argumentation theory, however we cannot merely rely on it…

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Is this blog abandoned? No way! Just taking a bit of a long break from it after a hectic end of the spring semester. Now that summer is in full swing, I’ll be posting more regularly. This week kicks off the return as I am in Amsterdam for the International Society for the Study of…

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Policy debate’s focus on race has attracted some media attention. The Atlantic ran an article that wondered if the way that winning debaters were interrogating the question of institutional racism, or white privilege, was doing harm to debate. Not far behind, the blog Powerline argued that yes indeed, from their point of view, these changes…

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