外研社辩论赛blog

I'm very happy to see that we finally have a place where everyone can chitchat. This site, in my opinion, can be of tremendous help to anyone involved in the debating competition. So bravo FLTRP. As a newcomer to this blog, I would like to open a discussion on the importance of rhetoric. Rhetoric, as everyone knows, has been closely related to public discourse since ancient Greece. Debating is a kind of public discourse, which falls into one of the three rhetorical settings by Aristotle, namely deliberative oratory. I think rhetoric ought to play a very important role in debating, and in these two years I've been trying to see if the debaters have realized its importance. I should say that, based on what I have drawn from my observation, the result is not very good. It seems to me that debaters have been too occupied with the desire to win to imploy some more "subtle" tactics. For example, in debating the goal is to convince your audience, so you need to establish a connection with your audience, which in this case, is the adjudicator. And while this seems to be a quite obvious point, a lot of debaters have neglected it. Establishing a good image and using it as a means of arousing your audience's emotion has been a very important aspect in public discourse. The way you talk, the way you handle "facts", even the way you dress are all key elements.