 |
| Irish Times clock on the new building at Townsend Street, Dublin. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
This is our second time hosting the Irish Times debate champions in New York. We were very pleased that the NPDA and the Times chose us as the anchor point for the start of this tour.
The debate we had was quite good. The Irish debaters are more Irish Times format debaters and not BP/Worlds debaters, which made for an interesting BP/Worlds debate.
Since I was hosting the debaters at my house, there was plenty of time to discuss debate and the various issues surrounding it. The best part was the critiques of BP/Worlds format offered by the Irish debaters:
1. Worlds format has too fast a delivery to be meaningful.
2. Arguments that are automatically persuasive in Worlds format would never be persuasive, or hardly ever persuasive, outside of that particular audience.
3. The debate is too technical, and people make a large amount of arguments in each speech
This sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Worlds is more like Policy debate than we realized.
I suppose any style of debate, modified for competition would lean toward these issues. As the audience becomes cut off from the general public, the audience demands more specialty from the speakers. Ironically, this marking is under the rubric of “more persuasive” argumentation.
How far down does the rabbit hole go?
Here is the public debate we had with the Irish, in Worlds format. I hope you enjoy it!
