Reflections on Speech and Debate: a Speech
I was honored to be awarded “Alumnus of the Year” by my former debate coach at Cornell, Sam Nelson, on May 4, 2025, after an invigorating and nostalgia-triggering adjudication of the final round of the annual 1984 debate tournament.
It’s cliche but true that it’s a tremendous honor to be presented with this award, and I have to confess that it’s that much more meaningful and touching to me that I get to receive it from Sam. Sam’s always seen much more potential in me than I’ve dared to recognize in myself. He somehow – and I say somehow because I truly can’t quite tell how – manages to make me feel seen, heard and supported with very few words. Sam’s a big part of the reason I feel connected to Cornell. And Sam has evidently not coached me enough for me to find all the right words to express my tremendous affection and gratitude towards him, so very simply – thank you Sam. Thank you for building and nurturing generations of speechies and debaters with infinite patience for our shenanigans, and unwavering determination to help us find our voices. We have no idea how lucky we are to have you – Coach of Every Year.
I like to joke that debate ruined me.
Debate ruined me because it led me to expect people to be logical. I thought that everyone knew how to separate a premise from a conclusion, recognize when a point is moot, and identify how and where issues intersect and where they do not.
Debate ruined me because I kept getting into misunderstandings where other people wouldn’t understand that just because I was asking them provoking questions from a different perspective, it didn’t mean I held that stance – it just meant I enjoyed exploring all the angles of an issue and the intellectual challenge of being thorough in understanding other positions.
But mostly, debate ruined me because I had gotten so used to intellectually sparring with others who were so skilled at giving structure to their thoughts – and my thoughts – that I forgot the burden of making my arguments clear was on me. No matter whom I was trying to make a point to. And that, instead of getting impatient and thinking, “Well if you did debate you’d know!” I should have been thinking, “How can I adapt the way I’m communicating to get my point across?”
I got into debate because I was told by a teacher in sixth grade that I’d be “good at debate” when I got to secondary school. Not wanting to squander potential potential, I signed up for the debate tournament in secondary school as soon as it was open. We did the Worlds Schools Debate format, with all prepared speeches and no points of information, and well, we won the tournament as first-timers. Heck yeah.
Three years later, I discovered British Parliamentary Debate at a first-ever debate summer camp run by university students. BP is what we today call Worlds Universities Debate format. It was love at first demo debate. I loved the adrenaline rush, the thinking on your feet, Points of Information oh my god you can try to interrupt someone live?!, the weird set-up where there’s two competing teams on the same side… but most of all, I fell head over heels with these debaters (mostly from Monash University in Australia) who were so commanding, cuttingly sharp, witty in their put-downs but always with a smile, who made it look so easy by looking relaxed even as they were condescendingly scoffing at their opponents’ arguments. They seemed charismatic and powerful, and so, so persuasive – I would believe anything they said. They were cool. I wanted to be just like that.
When I came to Cornell, I swore I was not going to get involved with speech and debate anymore. I was set on retiring from this activity and finding something new at college. I went to ClubFest, looked at every single table, signed up for too many listservs…and walked away conflicted, because the only thing I had felt really excited about was the Cornell Forensics Society – which is what the speech and debate society was called then.
So apparently getting out of speech and debate was going to be more difficult than I thought.
I dabbled and competed in all three activities. I wasn’t a prodigy and I didn’t win national championships – heck I didn’t even get to the finals for most tournaments – and for a while my ego was pretty bruised about it. At this point, this feeling was starting to get annoyingly familiar. In my last year of high school, I had gotten on the first-ever Hong Kong team for the World Individual Debating and Public Speaking Championships and competed internationally for the first time. Then, as now, I was confronted with the disappointment of not being the best. I wasn’t becoming the poised, eloquent, and humorously sharp speaker I envisioned being when I stood up to speak. I admired the stronger speakers I encountered, but also felt increasingly hopeless that I could ever become like them. Self-doubt started to creep in: I’m not good at this. I’m too lazy to work hard to become good at this. I’ll never be as good as I want to be. I cut my losses and started spending more time on other activities, like campus-wide event planning. I could construct sound logical arguments, I could speak in front of a crowd without fainting, and I wasn’t afraid of speaking my mind. What more can you ask for from doing speech and debate?
More, of course. In the last dozen years, through being in both corporate and unconventional workplaces, and through lots of very interesting life situations, I’ve come to realize there are three key lessons from speech and debate that I had overlooked. These lessons transcend format and occasion – they are useful in speech and debate, but invaluable everywhere else.
I should also note, this is the point in the speech where, were Sam to be coaching me on this, he would say, “You have to tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you’ve told them.” … and I’m not going to do that. Sorry, Sam.
Ever notice how novice Worlds debaters may get overly enthusiastic with offering Points of Information? There’s always at least one who can’t contain themselves and will keep popping up like a jack-in-the-box. They’re so eager to jump on every single possible point of rebuttal, they often waste a precious opportunity when they’re finally called upon by trying to mock some triviality that has no impact on the crux of the other team’s case. Eventually, we learn to use our POIs more strategically – we write down possible questions to ask, work on the phrasing, and try to state something searing that will undermine the speaker’s confidence but also shine unforgiving light on the biggest gaping hole in the other team’s case. I made that transition from being a springy annoyance to a smugly composed challenger – and in the process, I learned lesson number one: not all fights were worth picking, and sometimes it’s better to let things go. How to decide? It’s all about understanding your larger objective. Whether it’s to score higher points in a tournament round, or to preserve a relationship and avoid unnecessary inter-personal conflict, or to make a big impact in some socio-political realm, be thoughtful and strategic about when to fight for something, and when not to.
I used to think the best debaters were the ones that made the best cases. They were eloquent and commanding, poised and unflappable, and enviably organized in how they built their arguments. Now I know that all that is just a symptom of someone who has learned and internalized the true lesson of debate: deep, active listening.
Yep, listening. Lots of people think debate is synonymous with argument, or arguing, depending on if you’re thinking of the noun or the verb. And certainly outside of tournament settings, it seems that a lot of things labelled as debate are just opportunities for grand-standing and speech-making of two supposedly opposed parties with absolutely no focus on getting to any real clash. But I posit that the true craft of debate lies in deep, active listening. Listening to understand. Listening to dissect. Listening – and then responding.
Think about it: policy debaters spend all year lugging around tubs and tubs of evidence to debate the same topic, over and over again. The uninitiated would ask: what for? Doesn’t it get repetitive and boring? And perhaps it would be – if policy teams didn’t listen carefully to what their opposing team is actually laying out in their constructive speeches. You can’t compose a cutting rebuttal or lead a scathing cross-examination without staying in the moment and listening closely to exactly what is being put forward by your opponents. You have to put aside all your presumptions about what they are likely to say to hear what they are actually saying before planning your own response. Debates get the most interesting when we have clash, and we find clash by identifying ideological areas of overlap. We listen to understand why someone else thinks differently, how they formed those beliefs, and that leads us to jointly find common ground. On that common ground, the real work begins. Without listening, we’ll talk at each other, around each other, over each other’s heads – but never with each other. Lesson number two is to listen.
The last lesson turns out to have been staring me in the face all along. In 2011, Sam recruited a Worlds coach who had been a debater at Oxford. He bestowed upon us the motto “winning hearts and minds.” That seems simple enough. I always interpreted that there were two parts to that imperative: win hearts, win minds. Now I realize there’s only one imperative: win hearts. For every heart you win, the associated mind will follow. The opposite is not true: you can have all the reason in the world, and others may even concede it – such that you win their minds, but that doesn’t mean they’ll automatically start liking you. Probably far from it, actually.
Speech is where I really learned to win hearts. My favorite events were always the interpretation events: prose, poetry, dramatic, you name it. I love to feel something. To be persuaded without any explicitly stated premise, conclusion or takeaway. Something swells in your chest when you listen to a good interpretation event. If the speaker is skilled enough, you emerge utterly convinced about something but you’ve no idea what happened. Your empathy started mirroring what was projected and bam! – you’re feeling it, all the emotions, and when it’s all over, the feeling lingers, it stays with you. It’s not an argument you can articulate, but you’re convinced. And given what we know about psychology – that we rationalize more than we reason – knowing how to affect another’s emotions and win hearts is a powerful skill.
Pick your battles. Listen deeply. Win hearts. Speech and debate can seem so divisive on the surface, pitting two sides against each other – proposition to opposition, affirmative to negative, speaker to audience – but speech and debate is really meant to bring people together. Speech and debate are vehicles for developing mutual understanding and facilitating collaborative problem-solving. Through speech and debate, we can find for ourselves a better understanding of others not like us, and we can help others feel something similar to what we feel – and we all expand our appreciation for the nuances of the human experience a little bit at a time. Policy, Worlds, any number of the Speech events – these formats are just training grounds for you to practice and hone thinking and communication skills; the real goal is to take those skills to experience the world differently, connect with others more deeply and help others do the same.
The skills and experience you gain through your time in the Cornell Speech and Debate Society may or may not get validated by some trophies by the time you graduate, but they will certainly give you the choice of being a more compassionate person anywhere you go, every single day.