(This is a draft.)
They didn't put debate there as merely an occasion for expressing eloquence, charm, cleverness, or dominance.
Eloquence serves debate's search for the truth. We don't talk about America's challenges just to demonstrate our eloquence.
Searching for the truth requires engagement with the real world, and the proof that we're making that engagement is what we call evidence.
Without these smaller pieces of the truth, we can't assemble a larger truth on which we can act with confidence.
To me, respect for evidence is the single most important part of debate. Without it, we might as well be doing Impromptu.
Concretely, this means I'd prefer by a factor of one thousand that you look down at your legal pad and read a clean, fully-cited quotation than to try to dazzle me with confident eye-contact. If you speak without a legal pad, you're expecting me to trust you more than I'm usually willing to.
It's easy to guess how I feel about these loose "trust me they said this" paraphrases, citing daily newspapers by year only (if that). Might as well not even bother. And if it sounds illegit, welcome to the bottom half of the ballot.
It's also easy to guess how I feel about the late "crystallization" speeches which nearly always substitute rapid-fire error-free delivery for actual insight or advancement of the debate. Crystals are beautiful because their apparent complexity belies an elegant simplicity. Those speeches are neither beautiful nor elegant. Don't call it crystallization. Call it a sugar buzz: fun, quick, ultimately unsatisfying and at least a little bad for you.
I confess I'm in the minority on this, but I'm not alone. And every chance I get, I preach this to my colleagues, most of whom didn't sign on to watch our brightest kids dissemble prettily most weekends of the year.
I do get a lot of chances.
