Nervousness and pauses

A common difficulty for new and beginning debaters is unsurprisingly, the ability to speak continuously and smoothly without pauses or interruptions.

A particularly great challenge is merely possessing enough concrete material with which to fill a speech.

All these is further worsened by the nervousness of speaking in front of an audience you may not know and may not feel familiar with.

All debaters, even experienced and award-ladden debaters occasionally face the tremble of losing their nerves and worrying how they will perform to par.


However, experience with public speaking enables one to harness these nerves and develop an augmented sense of confidence that is even further driven by the heightened emotions of speaking aloud. The same energy that makes one feel nervous can be harnessed and turned into raw excitement, happiness, and even a broad range of other manipulable emotions.

As students accumulate experience speaking in front of a crowd, they will develop enough confidence and familiarity that they begin to 'speed', or speak quickly out of excitement. This is often further exacerbated by the pressure to 'cover' as much as they can, to get through all the material they have built of from listening to the debate and are eager to let loose on the opponent. The more knowledge and familiarity a debater has with a subject, the more likely he/her is to speak quickly and confidently.

On the otherhand unfamiliarity with a topic may often lead debaters to feel lost, confused, empty, neutral, and dispassionate about a debate. In these scenarios, the ability to evoke fluidity of thought and composure of words is greatly challenged, and debaters may find themselves literally at a loss for words.They may feel defeated, and worse of all, clueless, all while 'on the spot'. In these scenarios, the only viable option to traverse is to empty one's mind, concentrate, and belt of the first thing which comes to mind.

The ability to form a continuous thought is of paramount importance in debate, and the process of rattling one's raw thoughts off enable one to quickly recover and formulate a continuous thought chain. Any thought will do, including how one feels. This is an almost essential strategy to understanding's one's own frame of mind and communicating it to the audience, allowing them to understand where you will go next. After identifying your foremost thought, it is helpful to continue elaborating upon the most recently discussed topic before proceeding to the next logical topic.

Ideas you may have long held about the subject or feelings you hold quite strongly may often become expressed in the following stages because they are what's most familiar to your mind. The ability to utilize these thoughts and argue them convincingly is what separates a clear and focused argument from an uncoherent, disjointed, trailing off of thoughts.

Persuasion is paramount and must always be applied to every word that comes out of the mouth. If a sentence does not aid in the process of persuasion, is is better not spoken at all. Because adjudicators must evaluate and process an hour of continuous dialogue, a long pause allowing one to develop one's next idea may well be advantageous to the debater, as the judge can him/herself pause to absorb all that he/she has heard. If instead a debater chooses to enumerate ideas that while relevent to the topic, does not aid in persuasion, the audience will him/herself lose focus, and miss out on the information.

Because providing enough knowledge and information about a singular topic to fill 7 minutes is so demanding, debaters are led to fill the gap with any information that can be fit into the debate. While a useful strategy for beginners, it should gradually enable debaters to develop familiarity and confidence in speaking. At some point, the ability to draw ideas and knowledge spontaneously from every day life and turn it into persuasive reasoning becomes the goal of the debate.

There is a tradeoff. While the absence of speech and ideas to fill the prescribed time slot may feel diminutive to a debater, the tendency to turn to less persuasive content has ups and downs. On one hand it enables one to develop confidence in speaking continuously and spontaneously 'on the fly', it frequently damages one's relevance and authority on the subject matter at hand. No beginning debater should rely excessively on either approaches: While relevance and continuity of thought are both importance, neither one can be sacrificed completely in favor of the other. Furthermore, individual adjudicators often have their own perception of which one carries more importance and assign evaluation accordingly. It is advantageous to strike a balance, and perhaps experiment with either approaches whereever appropriate.

There are debates where energy requires one to spout off as much knowledge as possible and debates where the topic has already grown so comprehensive, the debater is better off taking a focused approach, and making short deliberate points while taking the time and energy to carefully compose them silently whilst pausing.