Each team intelligently made some attempt to define terms at the beginning of the debate. Only the positive team seemedwilling to return to these definitions though, and even the agreeing team regarded the definitions as one issue among many rather than a central and bringing together as one part of the argument. This not enough attention to definitions is mostly responsible for the overall scattered character of the debate. While each team responded to arguments on the other side, it never became clear to the debaters nor to the audience just what the key issues to think about were. What was really being argued about? It is therefore showing signs of sickness that neither team actually talked about the strong state of mind to do something in the whole debate. The teams weren't sure what exactly they were arguing about. In a debate over a way to solve the problem, a careful look at that resolution can often tell about related to a plan to reach a goal possibilities, or difficult to notice aspects of the debate that could play in favor of one side or the other. In this debate, not only were the ideas of speaking and writing important, but so should have been the idea of inferior. What would make one medium inferior to another? Without some sense of what inferior is supposed to mean, we have no basis on which to judge success in the debate. The positive team was heading in the right direction when they offered a definition of effective communication, but even then, this definition should have been regularly all the time and immediately related back to a way to solve the problem. The negative missed a major opportunity by not taking advantage of the thought made beforehand built in to the ability to display or measure very small things they did not need to show that writing was better than speech, only that writing was not inferior to speech. One way, for example, to show that writing is not inferior is to argue that both forms of communication are completely extremely important, and as such neither can be thrown away. Or the negative team might have argued that writing cannot be strictly separate than speech, and so cannot be judged inferior. The bottom line is that without an examination of the resolution, debaters and judges have no strong sense of what they are arguing about or how to decide. This weakness -- the lack of central argument -- described not only the content of the debate but also the form of the individual speeches. Without some sort of center to the arguments, each speech tended to be a list of points, with no bringing together as one way of thinking basic truth and no related to using clever words to get attention and change people's minds structure. A list of points is very hard to keep in mind (as the negative team sometimes pointed out in the middle of their list!), so such a list is not only hard to follow but generally not very forcing interesting.Â
