Debate Team Tournament

"We have to start teaching ourselves not to be afraid." - WIlliam Faulkner


Okay, so technically I was participating in Speech and it was a linguistic forensics tournament (different from criminal forensics).
It was SO much fun. Five out of the eight people on our team won trophies, which was awesome. I wasn't one of them, which I'm totally fine with except for that I didn't get one of my ballots back so I don't even know all of what I can improve upon for the next one. The teacher running the team is working on it.


Someone told me that my performance was the "scariest thing they'd ever seen." I suppose that's good. It was supposed to be scary, at any rate. Except now my throat is sore from all of the screaming I did. Yep: the Public Forum people had over 2 hours total of intense mental focus, where I had about 20 minutes of running around and yelling about monsters and mirrors and glass.


Explanation of my event:


Dramatic Interpretation is sort of like acting. No props, costumes, or sets are allowed, for one thing. The idea is to take a literary work (often a novel) and "interpret" either the entire thing or a selection in under 10 minutes using only words from the text except for when you introduce the book and premise. I was doing "In The Maelstrom" from Thoughts on Life. Which oddly enough, isn't cheating.


Apparently one of the judges thought I was moving around too much (granted, I was moving a heck of a lot more than the other people). I also think my rankings were affected by the fact that over the course of the three rounds I competed against maybe 5 of the people who won trophies (one of which I was in a room with 3 out of 4 times, and one 2/4).


Then Public Forum, since I mentioned it:


Two teams of two argue either pro or con of a resolution. Public Forum is centered around facts and statistics (whereas Lincoln Douglas is one-on-one and centers around values). The entire event is slightly over 30 minutes per round.