You discover that you enjoy debating from your club debates, or you remember the fun of debating from your high school or college days. You want to debate regularly and associate with adults who also like to debate. How is it possible? The obvious answer is to find other debaters, or potential debaters, and to band together in a society. In doing so, you follow in a tradition going back hundreds of years.
Unlike movies where Judy and Mickey produce a backyard musical, and two scenes later they are on Broadway, the creation of a successful debate society is an arduous task. If you decide to undertake it, however, then we in the Manhattan Chowder & Debate Society can make your burden lighter. We offer knowledge and bits of wisdom based on more than ten years of struggle.
Why Create a Debate Society?Where and How to Recruit Members?
Whether in Toastmasters or Not?
The success or failure of your debate society will largely depend on its purpose. MCDS has struggled and survived because its members are dedicated to debating. Its founding members created the society to debate, and its later members joined for that reason. Unfortunately, there can be other reasons for founding and joining a debate society, or other speaking club. A companion debate society in New Jersey failed because too many members started it for the wrong reasons. Some really wanted to learn to debate, but others joined to support the new president, a terrific salesperson. Others joined to help the district charter a new club; they were mostly district officers. So, the club started with a fat membership list that soon boiled down to a few stalwarts willing to work to learn debate and sustain the society. Too few.
Better that you start with fewer members who are joining you for one reason: to debate. A good test is to hold a few planned debates before you decide whether to launch a permanent organization. Most of the founding members of MCDS had been through occasional club and interclub debates; a few had taken a debating workshop at a local college. They were familiar with the demands of debating, but still had much to learn about staging debates month after month, year after year. It is from their debating that they reap their rewards; no other reason for creating the society else could have sustained them.
Where and How to Recruit Members?
Members of your debate society can come from within Toastmasters or from outside. Those from within can come from your club and from other clubs. If you are a Toastmaster, your best place to start is at home, in your own club. Then, you scout for prospects in other clubs in your district. District conferences and leadership institutes are opportunities to recruit. At speech contests, you might approach contestants, particularly those that seem cogent. Especially good opportunities are club and intraclub debates. When you hear about them, approach the debaters! They would not be in those debates unless they had some interest. They might not be willing to commit to a debate society, but you will not know unless you ask. Regardless of their interest, you should ask for referrals to others who might be interested.
Besides approaching prospective members directly, you should also use newsletters at all levels to announce your formation and meetings.
As within Toastmasters, you need also to search possible candidates where they gather. It might be in political organizations where their members aspire for office and need debating skills. It might be in business groups where their members sell to customers who want hard evidence and like to argue. You can ask to do presentations and even sample debates before these groups. As with Toastmasters newsletters, use the local news media to cast your net wide.
So far, the recruiting efforts that we have tried and recommend do not differ from those that you would use to start any Toastmasters club. However, there are some important differences. On the positive side, you can recruit Toastmasters without spiriting them away from their home clubs. What you offer is much different. Unless they have a weak commitment to their old clubs, they will have double memberships. At the start of MCDS, all our members had double memberships. Eventually, we pick up unaffiliated people, and some members left their old clubs but probably would have left anyway. Generally, Toastmasters and the district added new members and retained old ones because of MCDS. Thus, you should reassure club and district officers that your debate society is not competing with existing clubs for members.
Another way that your recruiting differs is that your pool of likely candidates is much smaller. Fewer people want to learn to debate than want to learn to speak publicly. Even few who speak well are willing to learn debate. Debating intimidates most people. They perceive it as difficult and threatening. Using techniques that we use and that you devise, you can ease the threat--to a degree. You are still left with a small pool of brave souls, which makes your job of finding and recruiting them a steep, uphill climb. Even though MCDS has been recruiting for more than ten years and receives much publicity in District 46, our own climb has not gotten easier.
Whether in Toastmasters or Not?
MCDS did not start as a Toastmasters International club, though all of its original members were Toastmasters. At the time, we did not feel that it was worth the bother to get a charter. Within six months, however, we realized that the benefits would outweigh the costs. Our primary motivation for seeking a charter was, and still is, recruitment. We continue to get most of our new members through Toastmasters, from either the TI referral list or district publicity.
Does that mean that we can depend on our parent organizations for survival? Not at all. For reasons described above, we must recruit outside Toastmasters and inside. We have been modestly successful in recruiting members who were ex-Toastmasters or never Toastmasters. Thus, our parent organizations have gain. We have also succeeded in extending the 'life' of Toastmasters. Long after they tired of their original clubs and left, they continued with our debate society. We provide an alternative to leaving Toastmasters for members who were not longer challenged by regular speechmaking. A joke in our society is that we have become a retirement home for former club presidents.
In short, it is a good idea for your debate society to become a specialty Toastmasters club.
If your debate society is going to be a specialty Toastmasters club, why not simply call it a "club"? First, your debate society is unlike a regular Toastmasters club. Regular clubs are more alike than unlike. It is distinctive. It will be different from the Manhattan Chowder & Debate Society, but similar enough to be family. Second, your debate society will be in a splendid American tradition.
In his book, The Unknown Abraham Lincoln, Dale Carnegie described how important debate societies were for 19th-Century Americans. In their small, isolated towns from New England to California, they learned to govern themselves democratically in local debate and parliamentary societies. It was in the New Salem Debate Society that young Lincoln got the argumentive skills that he needed as a lawyer and politician.
As a rule, your debate society should meet half as often as a regular club. That is because your debaters will work harder and need more time than regular speakers. Even the gungho should not debate more than every other month; otherwise, they grow weary. So, if you want a short lunch time meeting, then assemble biweekly; if you want a longer evening meeting, then assemble monthly. In turn, the time available to you will decide the format of the planned debate and the number of assigned debaters: two for the Lincoln-Douglas format and four for the standard format. It is possible that you may have so many available and willing debaters that you can meet as often as a regular club, but it is not likely.
Where to meet? A conference with plenty of room to spread paper is probably the best venue.
What Kind of Educational Program?
If your debate society is like ours, then nearly all your members will be inexperienced in debating. Some even may have not seen a formal debate. As with all Toastmasters clubs, your debate society helps your members to teach each other and themselves. To give them that support, you need to provide them with information about debating that they can learn as they apply it.
As foundation of your educational program, you can use the debate manual in this Web, which we modeled after Toastmasters manuals. You would use its forms, of course, for your evaluation sessions. You could also include in every meeting a short educational talk by the Debatemaster about some aspect of debating. It is most effective when it includes examples drawn from recent debates or anticipates the debate that is about to happen.
You should also give or sell to each new member a book, one that discusses debating in detail but does not overload working adults. We recommend strongly The Debater's Guide by Jon Ericson and James Murphy (Southern Illinois Press, P.O. Box 3697, Carbondale, IL 62902-3697). It is well-written, small, and cheap. Besides explaining policy debating, it covers value debating, which our manual does not.
If any of your members have debated in high school or college, then you should use their experience. They can serve as models, and they may know techniques that they can teach. However, they may bring habits that won them debate tournaments but will hinder their progress in a new environment. Their most obvious bad habit is to talk too fast. In varsity tournaments, they won trophies by spewing more arguments than their opponents could rebut, whatever quality. In the real world, where persuasion wins the prize, such patter is nonsense.
Another bad habit is disregard for delivery. For example, eye contact is nonexistent in debate tournaments. Even if debaters wanted to make contact with their judges, they could not. The judges are too busy scribbling on their "flow sheets," diagraming the arguments. Other techniques, such as vocal variety and hand movment, are also absent. Consequently, many good debaters are poor public speakers.
So, an important question for your educational program is how to help members acquire both public speaking skills and debating skills -- all skills required to persuade the audience. They require both logic and an earnest attitude. They need evidence and eye contact. They must learn to refute but they also need to use visual aids that people can read easily. Yet if all these skills are required, is it possible for your educational program to include them all? No. It must focus on debating skills; otherwise, there is not sufficient time. However, you can help bolster their public speaking skills, if they need help, by encouraging them to work on them at regular Toastmasters clubs. Often, we have referred prospective and new members to other clubs, before they join our society or while they attend ours. Unless they are competent in giving a regular speech, they will find debating doubly difficult.
Our advice is to schedule your debates as early as possible. In MCDS, we pass out little forms every month listing the next three meeting dates and ask all members to choose which dates are most convenient for them. Obviously, not all members can debate on the dates that they choose, but they have plenty of lead time. Even if they forget or do no preparation until just before the meeting, they usually honor their commitment. They have less of an excuse because they knew months beforehand.
With debate topics, we have a less formal procedure. Every other month, we nominate candidates from a list of possible topics that the Educational V.P. maintains and vote. The two most popular will be debate topics for the next two meetings. Their order is decided by the debaters scheduled. Though this procedure gives some debaters a month or less to prepare, that has rarely been a problem. They generally wait until the last week or two anyway.
Your members will mostly be adults who have jobs, families, and other commitments. Unlike students, they cannot devote their lives to debating. Consequently, they can spend little time in a given month on debating and your society. However, they can spend many months, and years, on them if they continue to enjoy and benefit from them. In other words, you should pace your educational program to their lives. For example, they will need to hear about stock issues in many educational talks and evaluations before they incorporate the issues thoroughly in their debating. Patience is essential to your educational program.