Posted by
RightTeacher on Saturday, January 26, 2008 1:06:50 PM
Another popular event in the high school forensic circuit is SpAr. This does not mean that the debaters put on boxing gloves, at least not literally. This stands for Spontaneous Argumentation. The pattern goes like this:
1 minute affirmative opening speech.
1 minute negative opening speech
3 minutes unstructured argumentation
1 minute negative closing speech.
1 minute affirmative closing speech.
Unstructured argumentation means that the candidates are free to argue with each other. Hopefully, they have a constructive discussion, but if they are incapable of doing this in certain situations, that would be a useful thing to know. The one minute speech format for this format is a bit anemic for a presidential debate, so we may want to bump up the time to two or three minutes for an opening speech and either ninety seconds or two minutes for the closing speech.
This would still leave a very short debate, so the ninety minute telecast could consist of more debates on more issues than Lincoln Douglas would, or it could allow for a greater number of candidates to debate each other.