When I graduated high school, after years of competitive debate, its mannered aggression, its postured arrogance, I discovered something most kids realize around fifth grade: most people don’t like to argue. At least, not in real life. Sitting around with my friends- poets, musicians, mechanical engineers- I poked at them, prodded them. Interrogated things. Pretty much always I was met with colored cheeks and strained voices; hurt feelings and pointed fingers. I didn’t understand why people stopped inviting me to the kickbacks; they didn’t understand why I was taking notes during our casual conversations. I learned most people only argue when they’re emotionally invested; when they’ve got skin in the game. Think about any of the fan communities online doxxing people in the comment sections and mentions and you’ll get what I mean. Same goes for anyone who cares about politics outside the media professional- things get touchy, and toes get stepped on. Why? Most of us view our interests, our endorsements, as extensions of ourselves. You can never “just like” a book, or “just follow” a celebrity; in any way supporting ‘media’ or content’ is to implicitly take it within you. In some way, it becomes emblematic of the type of person you are. (At least, this is how people my age think of things. I think all this amounts to one great big cultural fallacy, but as I’ve said, interjecting these things into discussions about Captain America tends to go poorly.)

Any time I got going, people’s hackles raised; they sensed a threat rather than someone keening for a good discussion. Now, this isn’t going to be a stodgy think piece where I argue America was once a nation of discourse and we need to return to form for our political sanity or emotional wellness; I’m more of the mind that we have always been, and will continue to be, masturbators, rather than master debaters. What I’m interested in- and I’ll be frank- is me, and my transition from the cold, anal world of competitive high school debate to a rather banal college life. And if I do my job right, here, you should end up interested, too.

As part of the reader-writer contract here I feel compelled to lay out my qualifications. I was never a Tournament of Champions or Nationals level competitor. I don’t know if I could have been, but my central Oklahoma high school certainly wasn’t flying anyone cross country to bid tournaments. (And likely I wouldn’t have been, because I spent quite a bit of my free time jumping train tracks in my friend’s busted-up jeep instead of practicing.) I won a few local tournaments on my lonesome, and put up a decent show at regionals and districts. My sophomore year was bisected by covid; just before senior year my family moved to North Carolina to a school without a team (or even a club) and I was out of the game. Junior year my partner and I fought our way to the state championship in public forum and that was pretty much the highlight of my debate career, at least as far as objective metrics go.

What’s peculiar is I remember very little of the actual argumentative contours of any one round or match or speech. In researching this piece, I read my affirmative argument for that state championship. The topic was “Resolved: The benefits of the International Monetary Fund outweigh the harms”. I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. It was like reading year old receipts, or text messages from when you were thirteen; whatever context of reasoning there was had dissipated across time and space. I don’t remember any whip-sharp rejoinders from cross-examination, I don’t remember any particularly adroit final focusses, and I don’t even remember any of the jokes my partner and I whispered to each other during prep time (which, granted, are probably too unbearably nerdy and in-jokey to be worth printing here). The minuscule moments of victory and defeat, in which there are dozens each round, are all lost to me.

Debaters have a specialized form of note-taking called flowing, which is a combination of bastardized shorthand, competitive argot, and specialized format jargon. Flowing is an instinctual process; you are never taught the slang and symbols, you simply develop them as you learn the game. Looking at my old flows now, every word and symbol is connected a thin string of gel ink: not cursive; my pen just never left the page. But flowing is also a useful construct for describing the feeling of debating, specifically the moments you’re delivering a speech or standing for cross-examination and you’re not even thinking anymore, there’s no calculation or hedging or odds-considering, at least not consciously; the words are flowing through you, or maybe you through the words. It’s more like you’re a conduit than anything else. I will attest, that at my highest performance, my competitive apexes, that I had literally no idea what I was saying.

This was my general recollection, but I attempted to verify it objectively. I searched through my old ballots on Tabroom.com- an online register and manifest of tournament results run by the National Speech and Debate Association- and found rounds where I was ranked highest speaker or made a full 30 speaker points. Speaks, as they’re known colloquially, are awarded by judges at round’s end, and are unconnected with winning or losing, although, of course, if you’re a better speaker you’re more liable to win. Speaks are given at discretion, and they ostensibly represent your command of rhetoric, logic, efficacy, and general oration. I cross-referenced my best rounds, speaker points-wise, with my flows and notes from same. Reader, I submit there is a direct inverse correlation between how little I wrote in the moment and how well I spoke. 

That doesn’t mean you can get away with no preparation, and, actually, not preparing is what killed me, usually; I spent many a three AM writing argument cases for a competition due to start ten hours from then. But I did have the advantages of team practice, where I did all manner of obscure and silly exercises designed to make me think sharper, argue smarter, and above all talk faster. I remember one I particularly hated, on account of how stupid I knew I must have looked doing it: you put a pen in your mouth (a Pilot G-2 07, if you had a shred of self respect) and cradled the stern of it on your tongue and sort of crimped the middle bit between your lips. And then you had to read your argument as fast as possible, clearly, articulately, and without any spit coming down your chin after. The goal of this, of course, was to make you into a lean mean word speaking machine, because no amount of competitive pressure could ever be scarier than having your own teammates watch saliva pour out of your mouth like a demented soda fountain. There were other drills, I remember, including one we used to spring on newbies where we would ask them what the most evil and defenseless concept of all time was and then, you guessed it, ask them to defend it. (We had to phase that one out, actually, on account of, well.)

During my junior year I was a fanatic. My partner and I worked out of the attic of her uncle’s dentistry during business hours and then come down to the receptionists’ desk at night, hauling enormous plastic tubs of notes and evidence down the unfinished plywood stairs. We annotated and cut up hundreds of pages of documents and legal proceedings; our final case file was near two hundred pages long, with the majority of the text in nine point font. (Times New Roman, of course.) I had memorized my prewritten speeches forwards and backwards, literally, and today four years later sometimes bits and pieces from them float up to me when I’m tired, or on the verge of unconsciousness, things like “optimally procured debt realignment beneficial to the IMF through the process of…” – something. And we ran our arguments over and over and over and over and over, against each other, against other debaters, against our parents, strangers, unwilling bystanders, honing them, tightening them, until they were more instinctual than logical. (And you thought a root canal couldn’t get any more painful.)

Here is the paradox: it’s the very same endless drill drill drill drill drill drill and prep prep prep prep prep prep that allows you to totally clear your mind and just speak. Pre-written opening speeches are one thing, but when you get into rebuttals it’s all about knowing your stuff, knowing instinctively how words fit together, knowing what your judge and opponents will intake and how they may try to distort it. It’s high stakes competitive yammering, and it sounds easier than it actually is, because there’s one thing we haven’t touched on yet, a constraint and a resultant technique that’s incredibly controversial and that totally alters the tactics of the game: the spread. (Here’s Ted Cruz, presidential candidate, sitting senator of the state of Texas, and one time NSDA national champion on the subject: “[Spreading is] a pernicious disease that has undermined the very essence of high school and college debate.” Sheesh!)

Some context: in most debate events, you don’t have all that much time to talk. In mine, public forum, I got seven minutes, total, split into two chunks of four and three minutes, respectively. And put eloquence and questioning and logical skill aside, because debate rounds are actually judged on refutation: you have to respond successfully to each individual argument your opponent makes, or else it’s considered “dropped”. At high levels, where both teams are bright and well-spoken and competent, wins and losses come down to who gets more arguments into their seven minutes. Since the beginning of the sport debaters have tried to write more, say more, pack more into their speeches, because of this natural imperative. Spreading is the natural conclusion.

Have you ever seen a Texas auctioneer negotiate a bidding war for a head of cattle? Or heard the Eminem song “Rap God”? That’s what spreading is- you speak as fast as humanly possible in order to jam in as many arguments as you can. (Actually, on “Rap God”, Eminem tops out at about 258 words a minute, which isn’t that much, by spread standards.) Written down in plain English it doesn’t sound so impressive, but consider the science of it: most people speak at between 100 to 150 words a minute in conversation. Now, triple that, and add in the fact that you have not prepared your speech beyond three or four rough bullet points, and also the stakes; scholarships, bragging rights, pride. Spreading emerged in the high level competitive scene in the early 90’s, where speakers could do about 280 WPM and clean up. No serious person on my team did less than 320. Recall earlier: at my best, a solid 330, I had no idea what I saying, and it felt amazing, and pure, like I was just the mouthpiece for something else. Like glossolalia, when priests suddenly break down and speak in rapid tongues- God’s language.

Now this sounds like total bullshit from a self-obsessed debate wash up remembering the ‘glory days’ and pontificating about past-tense pontification. But I mean it: good debate feels like a runner’s high, or sending a really clean set back and forth in tennis. It’s feeling completely and totally involved, all your faculties attuned to the moment and running on all cylinders. (It’s basically “flow”, as outlined by Hungarian-American psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi in 1975. When you lose yourself in a pleasant activity because it is challenging, stimulating, and at your level.)

In debate, like any other sport, flow-states can occur at any level of skill, but to be saying the words without understanding them requires a certain amount of practice and training. Basketball players can unthinkingly send three-pointers straight down the net because they’ve done ten thousand times three point drills; debaters can deliver speeches unthinkingly because they’ve spent hours with pens in their mouths and babbled endlessly forever.

I have a suspicion I said nothing of meaning, ever, that I reduced words to nothing, or elevated aphorisms to fact, but if this was the case my judge’s notes don’t reflect this.