What is Friday Debate Blog?

Raison d'ĂȘtre
Friday Debate Blog provides debate students with the opportunity to practise their argumentative, rhetorical and linguistic skills in a written context. It also offers the chance to anyone, anywhere, stumbling upon a debate and feeling interested in it, to influence its course by leaving a comment and voting. 

Format
Our model is The Economist, whose online debate format is adapted from the intervarsity-style spoken-word debates our students use each week in class. This format consists in a motion, typically of the form "This house believes that..." (THBT), or "This house would ..." (THW), defended by one team of debaters (the "proposers") and attacked by another (the "opposers"). Each debate has three rounds and each team has three debaters. The teams' opening speeches give their basic vision of the motion and present their main arguments. The rebuttal speeches develop these arguments whilst attacking those made by the other team in the previous round. Lastly, the closing speeches bring the finishing touches to each team's case and the decisive rebuttals of their opponents' arguments, ending with a stirring appeal for your vote, esteemed non-hypocritical reader! 

Comments and voting 
Comments may be posted and votes cast throughout the debate. Comments should not be new arguments, but similar to the "points of information" familiar from spoken-word debates, i.e. questions or challenges flagging up factual errors, oversights and omissions, inconsistencies in a team's overall position, weaknesses in its reasoning, etc. The debaters will try to respond to these comments in their speeches, insofar as this is possible. (Please try to respect basic norms of decorum when leaving a comment!)

Each debate has a poll, and just as comments are open to allcomers, anyone is entitled to vote at any moment in the debate. You may register only one vote, but have the right to change your mind as the debate progresses. At the end of the debate the poll closes, the winning team is announced and congratulated, and the Chairman (or woman) provides a report card evaluating the quality of the debate as he (or she) sees it. 

That's all very well, but why "Friday"?
The classes were originally held on Friday mornings, and the name seemed reasonable at the time. They have since moved, which is somewhat annoying, but what can you do? The important thing is that a debate can kick off at any time, so best keep a weather eye out, just in case...

Development 
This blog is in its early stages. There are many improvements that could be made, both to the format of the debates and their content, as well as to the style and layout of the blog itself. Ultimately we would like to widen our audience, host debates with students and teams from outside our home institution, and link up with other sites and organisations of a similar nature. We therefore welcome all suggestions and offers of help. Contact:

fridaydebateblog [at] gmail [dot] com

This is also the address if you wish to suggest motions that you'd like to see debated on the blog. And please don't hesitate to become one of our followers or to publicise our debates via other forms of social media. Let's create some buzz!

Disclaimer 
Finally, your attention is drawn to the disclaimer at the foot of the page. This is a site dedicated to competitive debating, an activity practised every week in schools and universities around the world by students who see it as both a stimulating intellectual exercise and a good way to discover new people and places. Competitive debaters agree to take on the role of advocates for one point of view or another in order to hone their argumentative and rhetorical skills and engage in the pleasurable activity of debating. The opinions they express and arguments they make should on no account be taken as an indication of their real convictions. But then you knew that anyway.

No comments:

Post a Comment