High School Debate

In Contest of Words: High School Debate and the Demise of Public Speech by Ben Lerner, the audience can see how the way in which people say words are more powerful than the words solely. In the essay, Lerner uses different anecdotes of his life to explain how words change as much as the world does. Lerner first utilizes the term “spread” in his essay when he was a high school debater and defines it as a competitor speaking hastily and attempting to “make more arguments and marshal more evidence than the other team can respond to within the allotted time” and uses it multiple times since he first introduces it (Lerner 420). To spread is to make the opposition weaker by speaking quickly. As he uses this term, he stresses the gradual avoidance of the “spread” as time carries on, and the increasing slowness of communication.

High school debating competitions are not all that it seems to be. According to Lerner, the events were incredibly stressful, almost pushing competitors close to the point of breaking. “I recall a continual low-level

Violence was often at the parties, mostly accompanied by inebriated adolescents, clouds of smoke, vomiting, passing out, making out, and freestyle rap battles. Using his extemporaneous public speaking skills to his advantage, Lerner would avoid violence by participating in the rap battles as another form of expression. He said, “Freestyling isn’t about fitting preexisting content into rhyming and rhythmic forms but rather about discovering content, what’s sayable, in the act of composition” (423). By “verbal jousting” (422), it did not matter to him what he was saying, or how he looked, what mattered to him was that “language, the fundamental medium of sociality, was being displayed in its abstract capacity, and that my friends and I would catch a glimpse, however fleeting, of grammar as pure possibility”