Public Speaking

I couldn't find a thread about public speaking after quick search, so I'm making it myself.

I've left the topic a little vague to encourage discussion about whatever form of public speaking you find relevant. Have to do an oral presentation for school/work? Have a horror story about a time you spoke in front of people and failed miserably? Were/are you involved in a debating or public speaking competition at school? Talk about it! I'd love to hear about everyone's experiences.

I'm now in my final year at school, and I'm the informal debating captain (there's a Public Speaking and Debating Captain, but no one in our year level does Public Speaking AND Debating, and the Public Speaking leader got the big job), but I haven't always had a good time debating. I used to go 3rd speaker - the one where you do a whole lot of summarising and countering the oppositions arguments on the spot.

This particular incident occurred in year 9 at an inter-school debating competition. The topic was something along the lines of 'using animals for lab tests is cruel and unnecessary', and to say we were going in under prepared would be an understatement. On top of that, we were going up against effectively our rival school, in the same way that Gary is Ash's rival - they tend to beat us in everything, and we're super salty about it.

As it turned out, there'd been a mix up between our 1st and 2nd speakers, and they basically spent 5 minutes raising the same argument each. On top of that, our opposition had managed to fill out their time quite nicely with just 1 argument each. Effectively, I had no material, and rather than adapt and make shit up on the spot I ended up saying 1 minute worth of content split over about 4 minutes.

We lost, and it wasn't close. I've taken 1st speaker ever since, but to be honest I think I'm better at it anyway.


Now, go talk about anything and everything you find relevant!
 
My all-time favourite memory in terms of public speaking was starting off a remembrance day speech in front of the whole school by quoting Stalin. That probably sounds bad, but I'm actually quite proud of the content of the speech. Rather than follow the typical line of "war is really bad, look how many ppl died, what amazing sacrifice" I used the quote "A single death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic" to try and directly challenge the audience about their views of war, since I think that quote can very readily be applied to the attitudes of people my age (myself included). Delivery-wise it was probably mediocre, I don't really remember. Of course, it being a school speech, no-one paid attention to it other than to note that I was the last speaker, except one teacher who told me I did a really good job, which was cool

These days whenever I have to give a public speech (only for uni really) I basically just think a lot about what I'm going to talk about and then wing it. The results I think are adequate, but far from inspiring, in large part because most of my attention is focussed on constructing what I'm going to say next, rather than on delivering it. I think if I tried I could be a really good public speaker, especially because my voice is normally quite good (depends on the context really, how comfortable I feel talking and stuff like that). Ironically, on the handful of occasions I've done voicework for youtube stuff I've sounded pretty terrible due to recording it in my room, where I feel uncomfortable talking loudly due to other ppl nearby. I suppose if I were to try and actually deliver a good speech I still wouldn't write it out, but instead just focus on practising it a few times. But that involves effort and preparation, and right now avoiding those things is difficult to prevent
 
Bumping because I had to give a more serious presentation about my own research than I ever have in the past. For a relatively uncharismatic nerd like me public speaking can be a bit of a challenge but streaming on twitch for 5 years has really helped with that, I guess. There was a certain amount of clarity in the way I chose my words that drew people in; they seemed to understand rather than zone out.

I'm curious, though, does anyone on here have experience creating slides and presentations for the scientific community at large? I feel like based on everything I learned in classes and good presentations in other areas the goal should be to shift focus to you. the presenter, and your speech, the slides serving to complement this and highlight big points that are easier to remember later. In my experience at conferences and such, however, the goal seems to be to vomit as much of your paper onto a slide as possible and read off it while no one can keep up with your droning. I realize these presentations are far more technical and there's a lot of content you want to get across to an audience that can presumably handle it, but I also doubt that the culture is optimized to strike the right balance between professional and readable here. Thoughts?
 
Bumping because I had to give a more serious presentation about my own research than I ever have in the past. For a relatively uncharismatic nerd like me public speaking can be a bit of a challenge but streaming on twitch for 5 years has really helped with that, I guess. There was a certain amount of clarity in the way I chose my words that drew people in; they seemed to understand rather than zone out.

I'm curious, though, does anyone on here have experience creating slides and presentations for the scientific community at large? I feel like based on everything I learned in classes and good presentations in other areas the goal should be to shift focus to you. the presenter, and your speech, the slides serving to complement this and highlight big points that are easier to remember later. In my experience at conferences and such, however, the goal seems to be to vomit as much of your paper onto a slide as possible and read off it while no one can keep up with your droning. I realize these presentations are far more technical and there's a lot of content you want to get across to an audience that can presumably handle it, but I also doubt that the culture is optimized to strike the right balance between professional and readable here. Thoughts?
I think a lot of scientists/researchers don't know how to present their work in a way that can be understood by people outside of their field. No matter what your presentation is, I think the goal should be to keep your crowd interested; capturing as much nuance as you can is secondary.

In this case it probably depends on why you're giving the presentation. If you signed yourself up, I'd definitely make it as engaging as possible, but if part of the criteria is showing other people that you know what you're talking about, it might be better to worry about information first and audience engagement second.
 
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I did speech and debate all four years of high school (National Forensic League back when I competed, they renamed to National Speech and Debate Association in 2013). My school was part of the Yosemite Forensics League in California.

Speech and debate was a uniformly excellent experience for me. I made lots of friends, befriending the teammates from my own school, as well as the competitors from other schools that I got to see from spending 4 years competing in the same league together. When you spend every other Saturday piling in a bus to travel to a school 60 miles away for a competition, it builds a real sense of camaraderie. Also, a significant portion of any event is sitting around between rounds waiting for judge tallying to finish, so you end up just naturally conversing with a lot of people while you wait for the next round. (I think anyone who has gone to a VGC or other IRL Pokemon tournament can relate). During my first year, I was one of maybe 3 freshmen on a team of about 40 people, and I actually spent a lot of my time hanging out with the upperclassmen as a result, which I think helped to "socialize" me during the otherwise awkward freshman year of high school (it allowed me to be part of a "clique"). Speech actually gave me some access to the "in" crowd at my school, since (contrary to stereotypes), speech is probably among the least "geeky" extra-circulars, which makes quite a bit of sense when you consider the advantage that folks with natural charisma have.

My preferred debate format was Lincoln-Douglas (one-on-one debates usually focusing on values-based questions of logic/ethics/philosophy), but I did Policy debate for a year at my coach's behest (our league didn't have very many Policy teams and I think he figured that going after the least-crowded debate format would be a good way for the school to rack up some trophies). I also had friends who occasionally roped me into the 2v2 Public Forum debate format. (I sometimes would "sub" in when someone's usual partner couldn't make it to a tournament.) Oh, and I loved Congress as a freshman just due to how chaotic the format was, being part of a debate in a room of 12 people was always more "fun" than the smaller formats, but I was pretty mediocre at it and it's also a really tough format (much harder to stand out in a group of a dozen people than to run hot and go undefeated in a series of 1v1 debates). Still, the "fun" of Congress is probably the biggest thing that got me hooked in as a freshman, and I made a lot of friends during that time.

I did numerous individual events. When I was a freshman, I tried doing Humerus Interpretation, since I fancied myself a funny guy, but I quickly found out that HI is much more about your ability to act and do different unique characters than simply say funny things. (It's much more like performing a play for children than a standup act.) By the time I was a senior, I had settled on Original Oratory as my original event of choice (you deliver an original speech describing a problem with society and proposing a solution), and during my senior year it was my "main event." I spent basically the entire academic year trying to craft and perfect the ideal OO speech with hopes of qualifying for the state competition. Near the end of the year, I decided to also try doing OI at the state qualifier, since you could compete in up to two individual events, and I figured it would be nice to have something else to do during the day, keep myself busy to keep from getting too antsy. For my OI speech, I chose "Achieving Your Childhood Dreams" by Randy Pausch, aka "The Last Lecture." (It's a speech that Pausch gave after being diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer.)

Anyway, near the end of my senior year I went to the state qualifier (my fourth and final one), did my speeches, and waited for the awards ceremony. At the awards ceremony, they call the top 6 competitors from each event to be recognized, but only the top 3 qualify to advance to state, so there's always a bit of tension as they announce the awards for 6th, 5th, and 4th place as the people on stage wait to find out if they're one of the three people who will get to go to state. When the awards for OO (my main event) came around, I was pretty bummed to find out that I didn't qualify, especially considering that I had spent the entire year working on that speech and it was my last year in the program. By the time the award announcements for OI (my "secondary event") came around, I was feeling pretty glum, but I heard my name called, and I dutifully marched to the stage. One by one, they announced the winners for 6th, 5th, and 4th place, reading off names that weren't mine, and I felt a wave of realization when I realized that I was in the top 3, qualifying for state. Then, they announced the winners for 3rd and 2nd place, and was in a state of near disbelief when I realized that I was the 1st place winner. I felt like a million bucks, positively beaming and walking off the stage to the applause of my teammates. I didn't place at state (California is a very competitive state), but simply being able to attend was an elating experience.

It's a bit funny that the most successful event of my entire high school speech career was also probably the one that I was least experienced in; my decision to do OI was very much an eleventh-hour thing, I hadn't touched the event during my first three years, and it wasn't until near the end of my senior year that I started practicing it. But in a way, I think that my relative lack of experience with the speech may have actually helped. I had practiced my OI enough to have fully memorized it and I never stumbled over my words, but there sometimes becomes a point of diminishing returns, and even a point at which you practice a speech so many times that it becomes rote and sterile and hard to inject any emotion into it. Also, one of the problems I had with OO was that I kept revising it throughout the year (trying to craft the "perfect speech"), which sometimes led to problems in competition where halfway through I would start reciting an older version of the speech, which would trip me up. With OI, I pretty much just learned the speech well enough to get through it without pauses or stumbling, and then hit the stage. I think that I'm actually at my best when I have just a hint of nervous energy, rather than delivering an over-practiced, over-rehearsed speech. Funny thing in retrospect is that despite all of the time I spent doing my OO, I can't really remember much of it apart from a few lines. On the other hand, eight years later I can still mostly recite my OI from memory. In terms of subject matter, the OI I chose is pretty emotionally charged, so I guess it makes sense that it would stick more in my mind, and looking back that probably also made it easier for me to give a "passionate" delivery, especially since I was delivering the speech less than a year after Randy Pausch had passed away at age 47.

By the way, here's the original version of that speech. (The version I did for competition was much shorter, excepted to fit the competition's 10-minute format.)
 
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Hulavuta

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Kikuichimonji no way dude, I actually did The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch in my high school Speech and Debate class. I did the shortened version that he gave on the Oprah show. It was a class that most other kids were "stuck in" because their other choices were already full or things like that. So I was one of the few kids who actually wanted to be there, but when I gave the speech the class was actually really engaged and interested, in a way that high school students usually aren't. Rightfully so, it really is a very inspiring speech. I always say that Randy Pausch is one of my heroes, it's not a stretch at all to say he changed my life. I think discovering him in 8th grade might've prevented me, at least in part, from getting into some bad influences in high school.

When I look back on it, the debate part of the Speech and Debate class was poor on my part. We used the worst arguments ever but we still won, as most kids were concerned with delivering their own arguments rather than refuting others. As I recall, we actually won an argument about the Electoral College by saying "You say Al Gore won the popular vote, so the electoral college is flawed. But George Bush was elected twice, so clearly the electoral system made the right choice." We did also have an argument about the electoral college being a part of the checks and balances system, which was probably more solid though. So it wasn't that awful.


As for public speaking, I'm actually really fond of it now, as long as I know what I am going to say ahead of time. I'm a performer at heart (mainly a musician) and if I can impress people with words, then it's exciting. But it's actually interesting because the first time I actually had to give a speech in school, in 5th grade, I actually broke down in tears in front of the entire grade and choked through the speech. Stared at the note cards the entire time and avoided making eye contact with anyone. Kind of a traumatic experience, especially as I prayed to God I wouldn't get picked to be first and sure enough, my name was pulled out of the little bag first. It wasn't the first time I had given a presentation, but as a speech it seemed a little more personal and embarrassing, as something you wrote. As opposed to just giving a presentation on what I researched about Crocodiles or Long-Tailed Weasels and such. Even though the speech was more like a biography of Bill Gates and didn't have much to do personally with me, it was still nerve-wracking.

The teachers said that public speaking would get easier as you grew up and eventually you'd grow to actually like and enjoy it. I didn't believe that at the time, but of course now I do. I don't think I ever got close to that same level of terror that I did in 5th grade, but throughout middle school I did get nervous and lose a little sleep on speeches. I think when I got to high school, it wasn't so bad anymore. And now it's at the point where I actually really enjoy public speaking and it's kind of second nature to me, just like a conversation (with way too many people). Nowadays I choose to give speeches, presentations, etc. I did a toast at my friends' wedding this Saturday for the first time, for example.

I think, because it's something you do throughout all levels of school and then into adult life, public speaking is one of the clearest and easily-revisited examples of a childhood fear that kind of dissipates as you grow older. Sometimes even into something enjoyable.
 

Da Letter El

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Policy debate master race. I know a few people on here who have done debate (Whistle and I wanna say DougJustDoug? There have been a few others. And I don't really feel like tagging them right now lol) but I always love talking about speech and debate.

I'm gonna rant a bit; this is mostly for me, I guess, but maybe it'll be an interesting read.

I've coached and judged for various middle school and high school speech and debate programs over the past 5 years, and I've coached just about every event the activity has to offer at this point. Did policy/cx for all of high school and did decently nationally (no TOC bids, but would consistently break at bid tournaments), then did IPDA, NPDA and a tournament or two of APDA in college. I would consistently break at tournaments but never get past semis (I was like 0-3 in semis and got walked over an additional 2 times aaaaaa).

Debate as a competitive activity gets so jargon heavy, for better or worse. So, a translation:

Policy/CX: policy debate, sometimes called cx or cross x, a 2v2 team debate. Notably has a portion of the debate where opponents will "cross examine" one another, asking questions about the case made and their implications, similar to a cross examination in a court room. Very evidence based; you end up cut up portions of reading scholarly articles in the debate itself. Can go very fast at the national level. Also is the best.

TOC: tournament of champions, an invitational tournament which requires high placing at competitive, designated national tournaments to compete in. A "bid" is basically an earned invite, and a "bid tournament" is one of these pre-designated tournaments that has these invites for placing in a certain round or better

Break: go to the playoffs

IPDA/NPDA/APDA: International/National/American Parliamentary Debate Association. The first one is a 1 on 1 debate style that's really southern and all about persuading the common man, so you focus a lot more on sounding pretty than on the points themselves. The second and third are both 2v2 team events and are like if someone told you to focus on making your points as logical as possible but to make sure not to cite too many statistics. It's a weird dichotomy but it mostly works out. Unless the other teams is a bag of dicks. Definitely the forms of debate most dicked over by having naggy and annoying opponents

Walked over: to save time because debate tournaments always run late and to save judges because tournaments never have enough judges, if two different competitors from the same school face one another in the playoffs, generally the team simply chooses the winner instead of having the two debate it out. The winner is said to have "walked over" the loser


That was literally two sentences and there's that much jargon, and I haven't even gotten started on the in-round jargon. Debate as a competitive activity can get so divorced from public speaking as a skill in the ways in which it manifests, especially when you move up the ranks. Tell me if this sentence makes any sense to you.

"You're going to pull the trigger for the Aff on the perm debate because the perm isn't severance and competes with the cp by the conceded link turn on the Heg DA; Heg flow. ..."

Not gonna bother explaining this one but this sentence makes perfect sense to any national level debater or judge.

Top policy debaters consistently hit a clip of above 400 words a minute. Easily. Some get into 500. It really gets to be a world of its own. And that's just one style of debate. It's amazing how debate as a competitive activity changes so drastically stylistically depending on the audience and the rules/style of the debate. There are at least 9 different formats of debate with reasonable popularity, with regional differences within even the same format. Some sound like auctioneer try-outs, some sound like someone's trying to explain politics to an 8 year old, and there's everything in between.

This speed, this jargon didn't come out of nowhere. When policy debate was first started, kids would carry around index cards with cited articles, would read at a snail's pace, and would need to overcome the burdens of Significance, Harms, Inherency, Topicality, and Solvency; five pillars, or "stock issues" by which if any were missing, the whole house would crumble and the opposing team would win (don't worry about what those mean; all you need to know is that Stock Issues judges still gotta have their SHITS). As a competitive activity, naturally people came to ask themselves, "How can I raise my chances of winning?" So people realized that if they have a limited amount of speaking time, why not speak a little faster? That way you'd be able to make more arguments. So this continued and continued. Later, people started asking, "how can I be prepared to answer anything my opponent might argue?" So kids came up with the idea to carry massive tubs filled with file folders with any possible argument or response a team might need (computers werent a thing back then). (Here's a good article about that aspect of debate.) Teams opposing the resolution began to ask, "what if instead of proving the other team's proposed action is inherently bad, I prove it prevents a better course of action of being possible?" And then the Counterplan was born. Debate is constantly and consistently evolving.

Speech and debate has always been a bit secluded. It costs money to get quality coaching, some decent clothing for a tournament, a laptop or a crap ton of paper (or both), research opportunities, and registration fees/flights/hotels/gas fees/van rentals and any and all fees to get to these various national tournaments. My school has national level sports teams in volleyball and water polo every year, and generally very strong baseball, basketball, soccer, and football teams. Our school's sports budget: football first, then debate, then everything else. Debate ain't cheap. The same (generally wealthy) high schools do well year after year because they have all the backfiles from previous years and have the budget to pay college kids to cut (find and trim) new evidence for them. It's a bit of a boy's club, too.

More recently, there's been a trend for teams to spend their time in the round ignoring the given topic of the round (say, if/how the US should invest in alternative energy) and instead talking about debate as an activity and turning the debate into more of a performance. In 2013, a team from Emporia State won both of the top collegiate debate tournaments (the first time anyone has ever won both) with a strategy like this, with their case being about the debate community being a home, a place for argumentative and identity inclusivity. There's an incredible (and long) ballot that sort of goes into what one judge was thinking (has a good bit of jargon though) here.

I was never all that outgoing. I was introverted to the max, I hated getting into arguments with anyone, and I certainly didn't have the confidence to stand and be judged on my opinions (or at least, the opinions I would choose to defend on the basis of the round, mine or not; you don't generally get to choose what side of the debate you're defending). I went into a summer debate program blind, pretty much just knowing I wanted to be able to communicate better and gain a bit of confidence. I never imagined that one choice would lead me to make closest friends and my fondest memories.

I think it's a bit ironic that this competitive activity which has become so obsessed with cries lamenting a lack of inclusivity is the one I found to be so accepting and welcoming. Maybe kids gets sensitive to including people when they lose a round to a team making arguments like that, who knows. But in any case, this activity is where I found my home, as debate is constantly expanding its socio-economic, racial, and gendered boundaries. Perhaps not as quickly as some might like, but expanding undeniably.

I'll still stumble over my words every now and again, but I guarantee you I wouldn't be half the writer I am now without speech and debate making me think about how opinions and facts interact with one another, or how to put these together into a cohesive, persuasive whole. I wouldn't have talked myself out of lynches in plenty of games in Circus, and I'm not sure I would have had the confidence to ask a girl out -- ok, debate probably didn't help with the last one, I'm still an awkward dork, but it's definitely made me a more articulate and confident person.

I am still not that outgoing. I'm still ridiculously introverted, and I still hate getting into arguments. But I'm not afraid to voice an opinion, I know I can talk to other people and be social, and I know just as well how to win an argument as to diffuse one. If anyone who read this has any remote interest in the high school activity that best prepares you for college and the working world, challenges you constantly to think both on your feet and throughout the long term, and will give you memories that will last forever, I cannot encourage more joining a speech and debate team.
 

Da Letter El

Officially internet famous
is a Community Leader Alumnus
Near the end of the year, I decided to also try doing OI at the state qualifier, since you could compete in up to two individual events, and I figured it would be nice to have something else to do during the day, keep myself busy to keep from getting too antsy. For my OI speech, I chose "Achieving Your Childhood Dreams" by Randy Pausch, aka "The Last Lecture." (It's a speech that Pausch gave after being diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer.)

Anyway, near the end of my senior year I went to the state qualifier (my fourth and final one), did my speeches, and waited for the awards ceremony. At the awards ceremony, they call the top 6 competitors from each event to be recognized, but only the top 3 qualify to advance to state, so there's always a bit of tension as they announce the awards for 6th, 5th, and 4th place as the people on stage wait to find out if they're one of the three people who will get to go to state. When the awards for OO (my main event) came around, I was pretty bummed to find out that I didn't qualify, especially considering that I had spent the entire year working on that speech and it was my last year in the program. By the time the award announcements for OI (my "secondary event") came around, I was feeling pretty glum, but I heard my name called, and I dutifully marched to the stage. One by one, they announced the winners for 6th, 5th, and 4th place, reading off names that weren't mine, and I felt a wave of realization when I realized that I was in the top 3, qualifying for state. Then, they announced the winners for 3rd and 2nd place, and was in a state of near disbelief when I realized that I was the 1st place winner. I felt like a million bucks, positively beaming and walking off the stage to the applause of my teammates. I didn't place at state (California is a very competitive state), but simply being able to attend was an elating experience.
A well done OI is such a joy to watch. But if I have to sit through someone stumbling through that Ellen Degeneres commencement speech one more time I would do unspeakable things. Grats though, getting to state in California is rough. I qualified once, and we ran out of money to send us that year lol.

Funny thing in retrospect is that despite all of the time I spent doing my OO, I can't really remember much of it apart from a few lines. On the other hand, eight years later I can still mostly recite my OI from memory. In terms of subject matter, the OI I chose is pretty emotionally charged, so I guess it makes sense that it would stick more in my mind, and looking back that probably also made it easier for me to give a "passionate" delivery, especially since I was delivering the speech less than a year after Randy Pausch had passed away at age 47.

By the way, here's the original version of that speech. (The version I did for competition was much shorter, excepted to fit the competition's 10-minute format.)
I still remember about half of the tags on my very first Affirmative case lol. I think when you start an activity, that's the one that's freshest and easiest to remember. I can barely remember what plan I ran senior year. Actually, can I remember at all? I was partnered with Morgan, we did the Aliens case once because oh topic was persons living in poverty. What was our normal case...nope, can't even remember. All I remember are the 3 joke cases we ran once each that year, lol

Also I'm still sad they changed from the NFL to the NSDA :( I used to love saying I was in the NFL. Or also that I was getting CSI training in the forensics league. So many dumb jokes gone. Now we are just stuck with the master debater joke ho hum...
 
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Da Letter El

Officially internet famous
is a Community Leader Alumnus
When I look back on it, the debate part of the Speech and Debate class was poor on my part. We used the worst arguments ever but we still won, as most kids were concerned with delivering their own arguments rather than refuting others. As I recall, we actually won an argument about the Electoral College by saying "You say Al Gore won the popular vote, so the electoral college is flawed. But George Bush was elected twice, so clearly the electoral system made the right choice." We did also have an argument about the electoral college being a part of the checks and balances system, which was probably more solid though. So it wasn't that awful.
Oh man, winning bad arguments is the move.

So the topic was that the United States federal government should provide social services to persons living in poverty. So we are debating against this powerhouse school's C team, we always lose to them, and we are already guaranteed to break to the outrounds/playoffs. So my partner convinces me that now is the perfect time to run the Aliens case. Basically, we argued that aliens exist, and they're clearly poor because they don't have any money. So if we give the aliens stuff, they won't kill us, they'll give us awesome technology, and we will create galactic peace. The other team drops like 4 good reasons why this clearly doesn't fit the topic, gives a better mechanism for engaging the aliens, and then talks about how this plan is super entrenched in capitalism, placing so much value on money and how evil capitalism is and all the bad shit it causes. So of course, the last argument they make is definitely their weakest in context, but it's their personal favorite argument to emphasize in their last speech in the vast majority of rounds. So we purposely under-respond to that argument and cover the other stuff as best we can (which isn't all that well). Lo and behold, they put all their eggs in the "you're capitalist scum" argument in their last speech. So my partner gets up and is like, "yeah ok, but since you stopped arguing with us on all that other stuff, you're conceding that aliens exist and we solve for galactic peace. That's probably more important." I've never seen a judge more mad to vote for me. He said if they focused on literally any other argument, they probably win. But if aliens exist and have this technology, it's probably ok to focus on money to save literally all life in the galaxy.

That was a good day.

They proceeded to fucking demolish us the next day in the outrounds because they didn't have to talk about aliens (and they were just better than us).
 
See, I'm not the best public speaker because I tend to talk faster than my brain thinks, and have trouble articulating my thoughts in live debates as a result. I don't have this issue performing music live at all because I have everything memorized, and I don't have an issue in everyday conversation, but it definitely is something that I would like to improve my skills / response time in because I absolutely do love to debate.
 

Da Letter El

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Simultaneously the best and worst advice I can give is that debating and public speaking are skills the same way music is: the more you practice them, the better you get at them.

Just uh, if you're not in college yet, that doesn't give you license to argue every little detail of what your parents and teachers tell you. They will get tired of your shit very quickly. Source: me.

Something that helped me when I got to college was recording myself ranting about something I have a strong informed opinion on. It hardly matters what the subject matter is; if you think Justin Bieber gets way too much flak for his recent music feel free to talk about it here, this doesn't need to be some political 2deep4me shit. Play it back and listen to yourself speak. Odds are it's gonna be littered with a bunch of "um"s and "uh"s. Pay attention to any phrases you use as a crutch, too, but these are less bad in day to day speech (stuff like repeating "at the end of the day," "generally," or "I don't know about you, but..."). If you're having trouble coming up with ideas of what to say, you can jot down some one to two word idea prompts on a document or paper on things you can talk about next, but don't use this unless you feel a need to and make sure you're not writing full sentences (because then you're just reading and that's a different skill). Try giving a speech on the same subject again and consciously be trying to reduce and replace the tendencies to want to say filler words with just pausing if need be and try to continuously talk as best as possible. In the process you'll be reducing pretty ugly filler words and getting some practice giving mini speeches on your opinions and putting those into a bit of structure. There's obviously some other drills but this is probably the one I noticed the most improvement with because it's just so noticeable when you start being conscious of exactly how many words people naturally waste.
 
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Simultaneously the best and worst advice I can give is that debating and public speaking are skills the same way music is: the more you practice them, the better you get at them.

Just uh, if you're not in college yet, that doesn't give you license to argue every little detail of what your parents and teachers tell you. They will get tired of your shit very quickly. Source: me.

Something that helped me when I got to college was recording myself ranting about something I have a strong informed opinion on. It hardly matters what the subject matter is; if you think Justin Bieber gets way too much flak for his recent music feel free to talk about it here, this doesn't need to be some political 2deep4me shit. Play it back and listen to yourself speak. Odds are it's gonna be littered with a bunch of "um"s and "uh"s. Pay attention to any phrases you use as a crutch, too, but these are less bad in day to day speech (stuff like repeating "at the end of the day" or "I don't know about you, but..."). If you're having trouble coming up with ideas of what to say, you can jot down some one to two word idea prompts on a document or paper on things you can talk about next, but don't use this unless you feel a need to and make sure you're not writing full sentences (because then you're just reading and that's a different skill). Try giving a speech on the same subject again and consciously be trying to reduce and replace the tendencies to want to say filler words with just pausing if need be and try to continuously talk as best as possible. In the process you'll be reducing pretty ugly filler words and getting some practice giving mini speeches on your opinions and putting those into a bit of structure. There's obviously some other drills but this is probably the one I noticed the most improvement with because it's just so noticeable when you start being conscious of exactly how many words people naturally waste.
Oh I'm 24, I haven't lived with either of my parents since I was 20 years old. But I'm gonna try some of those drills and see if they work out.
 

Da Letter El

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Cool. But yeah if you're consciously thinking about "I need to be making a somewhat coherent argument" and "I can't say um or uh" it should naturally slow down your talking speed. I just did the drill to myself and talked about the cats vs dogs debate and I went at a glacial pace lol. Only one "uh" though! (But a few crutch filler words).
 

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