Having fun while learning some new skills: the benefits of Speech and Debate

“When did I learn this?”: The benefits of Speech and Debate training

Many of us have devoted our time and efforts to clubs or sports, both in and out of school, which have left us with specific skills that we thought we would never use again. These skills do not just fade away, but simply remain inactive until something reactivates them both in our personal and academic lives.

I did Speech and Debate for most of my high school career, which meant practicing every week for Saturday tournaments where I would compete against other schools’ Speech and Debate teams and the individuals in my category. While I may not be spending my Saturdays competing anymore, a lot of skills and techniques I learned have both expectedly and unexpectedly transferred over into other aspects of my life.

In Speech and Debate, the skill you work on the most is public speaking. Whether or not you choose a public address category, this is a core skill within Speech and Debate. This is a skill that applies to many careers as well as academics. Many classes have students creating presentations or addressing their classmates in some shape or form, which puts a person’s public speaking skills to use.

One other skill and technique that transfers over easily is character popping. In Speech and Debate, for many of the interpretations and draw categories (you pick from a selection), character popping is when you switch between characters and from character to narrator.

While this skill is mostly used to have a visual way to tell characters apart from each other, it also helps with understanding the characters, which is very useful if you choose to act in any theater production, as understanding your character helps a lot when working on blocking for the characters.

This not only applies to acting out as a character in a play, but also to those who do creative writing, both as a major or a hobby; this skill can be reframed as a technique to better understand the characters of the stories they write.

While these skills are used most frequently in our lives, whether consciously or unconsciously, there are a few skills from Speech and Debate that I did not expect to transfer over. Speech and Debate has many categories a person can choose to compete in, and each comes with their own set of skills.

In my category, my competitors and I wrote our own pieces, which means we learned script writing. I never noticed this skill applying elsewhere in my life until I got more involved with theater. While I may not have written my own show, I had a better understanding of scripts, and it helped me a lot when I stage-managed my own show and worked with the actors on the blocking of scenes.

Another great skill that Speech and Debate also helps you with is networking or creating connections. When you compete against the same people in different tournaments, you begin to build a connection with your “competitors.”

While Speech and Debate is competitive like any other sport, you begin to form bonds with other like-minded people that you would not meet anywhere else. Even when you switch from competing to judging, you still form connections with other judges from schools you competed against, or you might see a familiar face when all the judges arrive.

Speech and Debate offers a place to build your confidence, not only in public speaking, but also in a plethora of skills that can be easily applied to other areas of your life, both now and in the future.

Many of these skills can be learned in other places in our lives, but Speech and Debate also offers a fun way to go about learning these skills. For me personally, Speech and Debate have been a fun experience that led me to meeting some amazing and creative people that I would not have met anywhere else, and if I could go back and do it again, I would do so without hesitation.