Why Speed Kills

The use of a high rate of a delivery in academic debate has long been an issue of controversy, leading old-school judges to withdraw their allegiance from the activity, fueling dissatisfaction and encouraging the formation of alternative debating leagues and formats. It is unfortunate that the main outcries against speed debate are based largely on misconceptions and flawed conventional wisdom. The most often heard objection to speed debate is that the practice results in poor analysis of the issues and arguments. This charge is, itself, fallacious. How rapidly one speaks has no necessary effect on the quality of one's argumentation or the rigor of one's thought. A brilliant debater will remain a brilliant debater whether she speaks like Alvin the Chipmunk or like Paul Harvey. Speed can be used as a ploy to mask shoddy analysis, however, but the solution to this problem is to encourage sound reasoning at all levels of experience and at all rates of delivery. The second major complaint leveled against rapid delivery is that speed destroys debate's benefits as a communication training ground. If students were taught from the beginning of their debate careers to use ample jargon, word economy and rapid delivery, this criticism might be more valid. However, the norm is more likely to recognize a variety of judging preferences, paradigms, and familiarity levels, and thus teaching rightly focuses on adapting to the audience. If one's audience can follow and understand, and actually prefers a rapid delivery peppered with jargon, then providing "speed and spread" is consistent with precepts of good communicative adaptation. Hopefully, a debater can vary his speed and presentation to adapt convincingly to other audiences as well, and few debaters leave high school under the impression that audiences in the "real world" will comprehend, much less enjoy and find persuasive, speeches ranging from 250 words per minute on up. Let's be honest, however: few debaters use speed to better adapt to the preferences of a judge. Speed is used to win rounds, and not by way of any lofty concepts of judge adaptation. For the most part, the rapid delivery strategy is simple: lodge enough arguments of varying degrees of quality that the opposition will be unable to address them all, then focus on the unaddressed arguments and use these--in combination with the "no new issues in rebuttals" rule--to claim victory. It is in circumstances like these that "disadvantages improve once dropped," as a debate colleague once put it. An argument which, on its face, is inadequate and easily answered, takes on decision-rule finality once the time for the first affirmative rebuttal runs out . Neither of the standard objections to rapid delivery serves to refute this practice. Critics of speed debate have not chosen their arguments well, preferring to base their