Why PF?

From the comments: “What made you move from ld to pf as opposed to ld to extemp and congress?”

The short answer is that I don’t know much about Extemp and Congress, and I’m very tied into the debate circuit. But there’s also a long answer.

LD and Policy, and now PF, are a way of life, at least around here. After one gets one’s feet wet as a novice (and, for that matter, occasionally even then), tournaments are multiple-day affairs. They require travel, planning and commitment. They are not an extracurricular activity so much as a student’s total non-class life. You can’t do it by popping in now and then, because your competition is way too dedicated and they’ll eat you for breakfast. You’ve got to dig in as much as they do. And you’ve got to do it weekend after weekend, all over the map. This kind of debate will subsume your life. And I consider that a good thing.

Around here, speech is maybe twice a month, one-day affairs within relatively easy driving distance, punctuated by the occasional college event. Debate is every weekend, somewhere, at some level of intensity. Not that everyone does every weekend, but a lot of people come close. They sort of have to.

I’ve always maintained that while the forensics activities themselves certainly have value, all the other things required for getting into those activities also have value. You can’t be a regular participant at debate tournaments without the ability to organize your life to do so. You have to get all your other work done to make it happen. You have to show up when and where you’re supposed to show up, week after week, tournament after tournament, meeting after meeting. This generates life skills that you will have to learn, if you haven’t already acquired them. The intensity of debate, and the frequency, solidifies those skills. Speech, because it is less ubiquitous and simply doesn’t take the time aside from the activity itself (I would imagine the strong extemper spends every bit as much time on prep as the strong LDer), doesn’t have that intensity aside from within the rounds themselves. It’s the travel, the planning, and the resulting competency that I value from committed debate. They’re just not part of speech, at least around here. And Extemp and Congress are lumped in with the speech tournaments, not the debate tournaments; I understand that it’s different elsewhere.

So it’s not the activities themselves, it’s the attending hoo-ha. In fact, I’m rather fond of Extemp and enjoy judging it at the occasional District tournament, but it’s just not where the action is for the debate life in the northeast.