Debate: 11th of Nov. '13

This week I am joining another debate competition. My team for this week's debate competition is the same as for the previous debate competition. I will be with Sherni and Valeska. Today's debate club meeting is aimed to prepare the students who are joining the debate competition this week. This week's debate competition is both impromptu and prompted with no notes allowed when speaking in the podium and a minimum amount of time of 7 minutes per speaker. With this unfamiliar rules, today's debate club meeting is used for my team and I to practice debating under the motion "THW eliminate gender category in sports" using the rules established for this week's debate competition. We practiced speaking without notes for at least 7 minutes. This adds more tension to the debate competition and I am really worried because when I practiced before, I couldn't reach 7 minutes and my organization skill was really really bad. I forget a lot of things that I was going to say. I skipped one main point of my argument. After today's debate club meeting, I feel really anxious. I just hope that the debate competition held this week will be kind enough to actually take back that rule. After today's debate club meeting, I can see major flaws my team has as a whole. I can see that our communication skills are not good. We talk but rarely listen to each other, thus we usually misunderstand each other when the debate has started. We also do not have enough data to support our arguments whereas the opponent had a lot of factual data. We based our arguments mainly on our hypothesis, which is bad because it won't be as strong. Surprisingly though my team won the debate round today. the adjudicators said that they could relate more to my team's arguments. So today I learned that the way we deliver our speech (if it's relatable to common people or not) affects drastically to our winning or losing.