Category: Uncategorized

  • Composition and Public Speaking

    I’m not having any fun teaching public speaking this semester – first time that’s happened in many years. The reason is that the students are incapable of interacting at the level that makes the class work. They do not see the value, or how-to, or why they should do anything but passively listen to me…

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  • The Relationship between Debate and Argument

    Not many people think about there being a relationship between these synonyms, but that’s exactly the point – they are not synonyms and have a wide variance of possible relations we can put them in. It is our binary-oriented society that is high on the supposed power of empiricism and statistics that conflates the two…

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  • The Eternal Sunshine of Public Forum Debate

    The film The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is the perfect film to explain why there are so many different American debate formats. It’s because we cannot erase our past relationships to what we love; we can only build upon/around/between that love. We can only articulate what we love about the target of our…

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  • Who is Policy Debate For? (Part 3)

    A multipart series

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  • I want no hand in teaching a Jenna Ellis

    In Plato’s Gorgias the fear of the rhetoric student is that they will use their power to manipulate, to trick, to “stand in” for the one who knows. They will be a powerful opponent to the one who “really knows” the law, who “really knows” medicine, and will give harmful advice and be a danger…

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  • Week of October 23

    Hey there subscribers – What sort of topics are you interested in seeing written about here? Also, would you prefer private videos or audio? let me know if that would be of interest. Thanks again for subscribing!

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  • Who is Policy Debate For? (Part 2)

    Part 2 of an undefined series

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  • Who is Policy Debate For? (Part 1)

    Possibly a Multi-Part Series?

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  • Keynote Addresses

    A post late in coming. What is a keynote address? What should it be? Recent experiences at a conference make me think that this practice isn’t one at all. It’s just “give a long time to someone whose work everyone is familiar with or should be.” It’s no different than a conference paper presentation except…

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  • My Old Teachers

    All of my old teachers are dead. This is something that pops into my head once in a while although it isn’t completely, literally true. Many of my teachers are old or were old when they taught me and are still alive, and there are some I’m sure who have passed. But do old teachers…

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