Hammond,+Herb

The legitimate purpose of Public Forum Debate is two-fold. First, participants should be enhancing their skills in oral communication. Public Forum is intended to be a unique opportunity among debate categories for the art of communicating to a lay audience. The second legitimate purpose is to enable students to engage in reasoning applicable to real world situations. It is illegitimate… an abuse of Public Forum to treat these debates as policy light or Lincoln-Douglas light. Therefore, this judge will evaluate the performance of participants in PF on the quality of their communication to a presumed lay person. Participants will also be judged on their ability to support their arguments with either sound deductive or cogent inductive reasoning… again in the context of a presumed lay person. This judge will evaluation performance in three categories. These categories are the classical categories of rhetoric: //Logos, ethos & pathos.// //Logos//: Is the framework of the argument sound or cogent? Do the warrants (contentions/evidence) have clear inferential relationships to the claim defined by the argument’s logical framework. Is the evidence reliable? This judge may review dubious evidence even if the other participants in the round do not. Is the argument free of common fallacies? Arguments containing any of the following common abuses of logic will disqualify the entire argument for consideration in the round: all forms of //ad hominem// reasoning, hasty generalizations//, post hoc//, false cause, straw man, slippery slope, complex questions, begging the question, red herrings, appeals to ignorance false dichotomies & weak or inappropriate analogies. //Ethos//: Participants must be respectful of the judge and the other participations in the round. The tone of voice, speed of presentation, avoidance of jargon and acronyms all must be consistent with good standards of communication to a presumed lay judge. What this judge will consider appropriate PF //ethos// is good clear, well- reasoned, easy to audibilize, easy to comprehend “argumentation”: the act of giving reasons for or against something. Being “argumentative” or “disputatious” is inappropriate. Participants should NOT presume this judge will track the flow of their arguments or even take many notes. It is in fact rude to presume that the judge’s responsibility is to comprehend a participant’s argument. On the contrary it is the participant’s responsibility to assure that his or her argument is easily comprehended. Note: Any point not readily understood by this judge will not be considered in the round; and therefore, cannot be dropped by the opposition. //Pathos// : Of course blatant appeals to emotion are inappropriate in ethical debate. Nevertheless, to be persuasive, participants must display enthusiasm. Presentations must have energy. A presentation that is dry, technical, depressing or boring has little chance of being persuasive. It does not matter how good the evidence is, or how sound the logic is, if the interest of the listener is lost the debater’s points may be missed. Presentations should be dynamic, interesting even humorous to keep the attention of the lay listener. Only then can the debater be confident all of his or her points have been made.
 * H Hammond PF Judge Paradigm**