Dramatic Interprations: The Right Way

I'm sitting in DI finals. The door creaks open. The first speaker walks in. I grip the edge of my seat in excitement. It's like that moment when the lights dim in the movie theater. The judge's set down their pens. They're ready. The timer's ready. She didn't ask, but I'm ready. I'm ready to cry till my face hurts and be scared senseless until those little goosebumps appear on my arms. Let's begin.

I'm not going to give you a play by play of every speech, but this is a few of the endings.

"I was so happy I'd found a friend."
"All was well."
"They cheered for me."

Etc.

No.

No.

NO.

NO.

NO.

This is not DI at all.
This is OI, at the most.
This makes me want to squall.
Do this in front of me and you're toast.

Had a Dr. Suess moment.

Seriously, though.

Let me give you a little history of my own competition in DI, which will help explain my position.

My first year I gave a speech about the death of a military captain due to the actions of their mentally unstable PTSD confidential informant. It was well cut. It was sad. Let's set aside the fact it was my first year and I could not act, pop, or enunciate properly.

Afterwards, I asked my friend Jamie how I did. His response was, well...

"Er...."
"I know it was terrible, now tell me why."
"It was like the old DIs."

This was a reference to the way DI was a long time ago (and me and Qui Gon Jin tried to talk the Federation into cutting them a little slack...) before Jacob Aschmutat.
Jake, my Parli coach, reinvented what DI was. Before him, DIs were all sad Steel Magnolia-esq speeches. By the way, don't do Steel Magnolias. It's overdone.
Then Jake did The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe.
He made DI's scary.
DI has never really been the same since. He changed the whole thing. I'm not saying sad DIs are bad, in fact some of them are really good. (Watch this one, one of the very very select few sad DIs I like: Mick Harte Was Here. It took 6th place at Nats.)

What I'm saying is DI should not be mellow.

DI is not the mildly depressing chick flick category.

STOP MAKING IT THAT WAY.

It's like my coach Carys was constantly trying to tell me my novice year: Just because somebody dies doesn't make it sad.

This has caused me to form a bias towards scary speeches. Honestly, those are the speeches I'd rather watch. Those are the speeches everyone will talk about all season long. Maybe next season, too.
The best DIs I ever watched were scary. I'll link them here:

WARNING: I would advise not watching these if you are under the age of twelve. They are both quite scary and have actually given people I know nightmares. In fact, my general rule for scary DIs is if you don't have to ask the under-agers to leave the room you're not doing it right.

Christine Reid's The Crucible
Carys Aschmutat's  Sybil

Let me talk a little bit about each of these speeches.

Christine and Carys were friends during their competition years. Carys's was the first DI I ever saw. Afterwards, nothing else seemed to compare. It was like eating expensive dark chocolate on the beach while be serenaded by British Alt Rock stars, and after that being stuck doing Chem homework nibbling on Great Value imposter M&M's. Until I saw Christine's.
 Carys has re-told the story of the Glass Regionals many times. I will now tell it to you:

Once upon a time in NCFCA regionals, all the classrooms had glass walls. This was extremely distracting yet really cool at the same time. 
Carys was standing in the courtyard talking to a friend when she was shocked to see Christine in a speech room through the glass walls, writhing and apparently screaming, twisting a wrenching and throwing herself around the room.
Later Carys found out Christine was just doing a Dramatic on the Crucible, and all was well.
But not really.
Apparently, one of the judges in Christine's room was missionary pastor who had spent a lot of time in Africa and other foreign countries. He had witnessed many possessions. After judging Christine's speech, he rounded up her, her coach, her parents, and the tournament director and insisted Christine herself really was possessed and wanted to do a exorcism. 
According to Christine, she had done extensive research on possession, looking up the ticks, habits, and posture of a person inhabited by a demon to make her DI more realistic, and practiced endlessly, making her blocking perfect. The pastor was not convinced, and when he couldn't convince her parents to do a exorcism, tried to get her disqualified.
Carys assured us all her sweet, kind, Christian homeschooled friend was most certainly not possessed. 
Carys always ended the story saying that she thought that was the greatest compliment to Christine's acting ability she could have received and that that was how good, how scary, you should be when DIing.
I completely agree.

This is a call to all DIers everywhere to step up their game. I want to cry, I want to get goosebumps, I want to feel so freaked I out I want to leave the room.
This is only time I you will probably ever here me say no more mushy sweet endings.

~Kylie~  

7 Non-Traditional Speech and Debate Resources

We all love our Red/Blue book, our coaches, Wikipedia, Fox News, our Black's Law Dictionary, our briefcase. We own twenty different pens each and can't live without our folders, notecards, and highlighters for evidence.
But there's more. A whole new world (I swear I won't start singing) of speech and debate awesome.

 I love using all sort of different weird things to supplement my personal quest of ultimate speechanddebateism. Here are some of my favorites.

1. Pinterest
There are two ways you can use Pinterest for speech and debate.
The first is to create boards of evidence for debate or extemp, or even quotes from movies/books/etc for Mars Hill ideas to then copy down in your notebook. This is for the serious people. 
The second is to pin hilarious s/d related memes that make you laugh. Or make you want sit on the internet just five more hours and pin more  #thestruggleisreal. Shameless advertising: This is a link to my Speech and Debate Pinterest board, which includes mostly funny things but also some good, serious quotes.

2. Youtube
Just type in "Humorous Interp" and prepare to be amazed.

Pros: Seeing amazing speeches from the past and getting ideas, being entertained, becoming awed and inspired. About ninety percent of my youtube history is watching nationally ranked speeches. The rest is Rhett and Link rap battles, Bad Lip Readings, and AVBite musicals.
Another thing I like to do on YouTube for debate is watch recorded debate rounds. I watch the first affirmative constructive, or only AC is it's LD, flowing all the while. Then I pause the video, give myself prep time, and deliver my 'rebuttal' to my phone, which records my voice. Then I play the video and compare the 'real' rebuttal to mine, figuring out what I did and didn't like about both. This is especially helpful for Parli. Recording my voice is so I can listen to it afterwards and rank my own speaks. That way I can say stuff like, "Hey, I didn't realize I sound so robotic when reading my tags. I'll work on that."

Cons: Horrible interps from your newbie years that somebody decided to videotape and now haunt you via the internet. Please, for the love of impact, don't ever look me up on Youtube.

3. Blogs
Yep. Hopefully this one has given you lots of brilliant ideas. I've got more listed in the column to the right listed something like 'Great S/D Resources'. I've also found writing a blog gets my enthusiasm up and the creative juices flowing.

4. Texting
I know, I'm one of those uber annoying stereotypical female teenaged extroverts who things texting is so totally fetch.
Haha, no. All you cynics, listen up, because I'm about to tell you how texting can actually help your debate skills.
You know when you're in semi-finals? No, I don't mean literally breaking to semis, but going to watch semis. Because chances are if you're not in them you're watching them. If not willingly, your coach will probably make you.
Anyway, you have this amazing argument against the neg's third contention that you're mad the aff isn't bringing up (isn't everything so much clearer when you're NOT at the podium?). You have three options. A. You could keep it to yourself and let it die in the recesses of your mind, or maybe maybe maybe but probably not re-read your flow (because you're totally flowing like your coach told you to...) and add it to a brief. B. You could be that really annoying obnoxious person who whispers to the guy next to you during the round. More on the do's and don'ts of whispering in a round in this post.
Or, C. Text back and forth with you're debate partner of BFF who's probably watching, too. It's super fun and non-distracting.

5. Camera Phones
This is gaining popularity like Passenger did after he released "Let Her Go". (#Hipstermoment: I loved them/him--he went solo and kept the name--before that and have every single album).
For non-music-addicts, it's spreading like crazy. The idea is to take a picture of postings so you have your order number or side, room number, floor number, and opponent(s) name(s) at the palm of your hand. If you're like me, you have to stare at postings for five solid minutes and mutter under your breathe all the way there to effectively remember. Even then, sometimes I have to check a third or forth time. Camera phone solves all that.

6. Non-Consumable Travel Coffee Mugs
This can hold:
1. Coffee (duh)
2. Hot tea
3. Soup for on-the-go.
These are amazing to carry around tournie and eat/drink while talking, reciting, judging juniors, or just hanging out listening to that one guy who brought a guitar. There is nothing more boring than sitting by yourself eating soup out of a bowl waiting for breaks.

7. Doubled-Sided Sticky Notes
Never, ever, go to a tournie or a club meeting or anywhere without these. They are self-explanatory.

Losing (or Winning) Because of a Technicality.

I don't know about you, but the first time I broke I was super excited. Except for when I read my ballots.

I was number eight out of the eight people who broke, but considering it was only my second tournie, I was elated.

Then the ballots came in. It was Storytelling (anybody remember that...a long long time ago in a galaxy far away..Naboo was under an attack...you know, last season?) and I forgot to cite my source in finals.

YES I DID THAT. *horrified face*

And not just in finals every single prelim round, too.

To be fair to my little newbie self, I didn't even know it was a rule, I must have skimmed through it on the website. But I still want to go back and bop fourteen-year-old me on the head and remind her to read the rules properly and practice in club, for goodness's sake.

Some of you think I might be being a little overdramatic about this. However, that medal could have been a trophy.

But, you know what? My coach was hugging me. My teammates were patting me on the back. I was beaming.

So can we please all go back to when we were all novices and we were over the moon just to get a certificate and a handshake? I think that kind of gratitude is awesome. It was that little push that made me want to work harder, to break again, to go to NITOC, to actually do my homework. Which my fellow used-to-be-novices turned student coaches and I are now shelling out.

Sometimes it's the little victories, like not feeling like crumpling to the floor while being cross-exed or never once saying "um" during your limited prep round. Those things can turn an 'I would like to cry now' day into an 'I can do this' day. If you let them.

Now, what about winning because of a technicality?

Sometimes in debate your opponent, or maybe another person in your speech room, does something a bit absent-minded. Maybe they have a definition that actually supports your case better or they say something slightly offensive about a certain minority group (like forgetting to use people-first language or a controversial term for illegal immigrants). These aren't these are rules-based technicalities like my source citing mistake. But they are still pretty "technical" mistakes, the latter more than the former.

Personally, this is my least favorite way to win. Of course, I still prefer to win (>;P), but think about how much you hate to lose based on these sorts of things. If your opponent has great points, better logic, more applicable examples, and a reigning value and you beat them based on a hole-y def —unless it's painfully obvious and case-destroying, naturally—or iffy wording, then it kind of feels like to me like I didn't really beat them. Same thing in a speech round.

Sometimes you get backed into a corner in debate and you get tempted to pull something technical-ish to save yourself. You want to nail them a logical fallacy of which they barely committed or didn't at all.

Do not be that person.

Don't be the person that gets complained about because you accused your opponent of doing things they didn't do.

Instead focus on values, on arguments, on logic, on everything in between. Just don't go below the belt.

But if they ARE committing a fallacy, nail 'em. There is no better, clearer way to win a round. Which is why it burns when you didn't commit one and somebody says you did.

Once I was debating and I basically said "How my opponent's value and criterion links to the resolution is very unclear. Here's why mine are better..." This is a commonly used argument in value debate. Always, always, always give a value link of some sort.

She came back by claiming I had used the logical fallacy of ad hominem. Which is the logical fallacy of personally attacking someone instead of their case. She argued I had attacked her ability to be clear instead of the clarity of the argument itself.

I'm going to act like a I two year old here and say: "I totally did not!"

Don't worry, I didn't say that in the round.

Here's the thing, if you feel like you're backed into a corner and there's nothing you can do:
1. Fight to the death respectfully and logically.
2. Keep your flow and brief the case.
3. Know that you were debating a talented competitor, tell them you think so after the round, and use the experience to get better.

~Kylie~