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9.8 Exercises for Chapter 9
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The final speech on each side of the debate is called a Whip speech. Speakers giving Whip speeches incur distinct expectations and limitations, different from speakers giving any of the other speeches in the debate. The fact that these expectations and limitations exist does not imply only one way to give a successful Whip speech; many such ways exist, but certain specific expectations for this kind of speech still remain.
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思辨精英：英语辩论-构筑全球视角 [:1705132398]
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9.1 Overview of Whip Speeches
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The main purpose of a Whip speech is to summarize the debate that has just occurred in a manner that shows why the arguments on the Whip speaker’s side of the debate should prevail. Just as an individual persuasive speech should have a conclusion that emphasizes the most important elements of the speech, the Whip speech should emphasize the most important arguments that have been made by the previous three speakers on his or her side. The most effective methods of summarizing the debate will make direct comparisons between the two sides of the debate rather than focusing solely on what was said by only one side.
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Some differences exist between what is expected in a Government Whip speech and in an Opposition Whip speech. Entirely new arguments are strongly discouraged in the Opposition Whip speech, because allowing a new argument that the other side would have no opportunity to refute would be unfair. In contrast, new arguments are permitted in the Government Whip speech, although, presenting new arguments in this speech is strongly discouraged because these arguments would be better presented in the Member of Government speech, when both sides will have time to discuss them. So, the persuasiveness of new arguments in the Government Whip speech may be discounted to some degree. The Government Whip also has the very important job of refuting any new arguments that have been presented by the Member of Opposition, because the Government Whip is the only speaker with the opportunity to do that. Failure to do so may be considered a major flaw in a Government Whip speech, assuming that new arguments that need to be refuted were presented in the Member of Opposition speech. The characteristics of good refutation will be covered elsewhere and will not be discussed here, but a generally agreed upon idea is that the rebuttal portion of the Government Whip speech should come first and should be brief. Of course, the Opposition Whip speaker has the option of refuting the Member of Government’s extension argument, but this obligation is not as important because the Opposition Whip speaker can fold that refutation into his or her summary.
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The most important part of any good Whip speech is the summary. The three primary goals of the summary are: 1) to provide an honest and accurate comparison of the two sides of the debate; 2) to demonstrate the superiority of the Whip speaker’s position in the debate; and, 3) to highlight the importance of contributions made by the Whip speaker’s team. Accomplishing those three goals and finding the right balance between them can be a challenge, but a good Whip speaker should never lose sight of the fact that the overarching goal is to give a persuasive speech, a speech that convinces the audience that the Whip speaker’s side of the debate is more likely to be right. A strong summary is a means to that larger goal.
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Obviously, certain tensions exist among these goals. If the Whip speaker’s side is clearly losing the debate, then an entirely honest and accurate summary would probably not do a good job of demonstrating the superiority of the closing team’s position. Similarly, if the Whip speaker’s team contributed very little, then a perfectly accurate summary will not emphasize the importance of that team’s contribution to the debate. But, in the end, honesty and accuracy need to be the primary guides in summarizing the debate, because a debater will gain very little by making assertions that are dishonest or inaccurate. Judges will almost certainly recognize when a debater is not being honest and accurate, and will look upon the Whip speaker very unfavorably because of it.
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Distinguishing between honesty and accuracy on the one hand, and impartiality on the other hand can largely resolve the apparent tensions. Judges and audiences expect that the Whip’s interpretation of the debate will be biased toward that debater’s side of the debate, and as long as the Whip speaker is not saying anything false, he or she can safely summarize the debate by emphasizing the aspects of the debate that favored the Whip speaker’s side in the debate. Summarizing the debate in such a manner is not impartial, but is still honest and accurate. Things are somewhat more complicated when the Whip tries to decide how to best emphasize his or her team’s contribution to the debate if that contribution was not actually as significant as what was offered by the opening team on the Whip’s side. In this case, the most accurate thing to do is to offer a summary that highlights the arguments from the opening team, because by being obviously inaccurate, even a good Whip speaker will not fool the judges into thinking the contributions of the closing team were more important than they were. This may not help the closing team place above the opening team on their side (which they probably do not deserve), but they may end up in second place. In contrast, trying to claim that they added more than they did, in addition to being ethically dubious, may very well put that team into an even lower ranking.
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Before moving into the details of how to create a good summary, this chapter will consider the reasons why Whip speeches are particularly difficult. A good Whip speaker needs to say something new, without saying anything new. He or she needs to say something new because any speech that merely repeats what the audience has already heard from another speaker would not be engaging or persuasive. The Whip speaker must not say anything new because, as described above, the strong expectation is that the final speaker should not add new arguments. This is the paradox of Whip speeches. Understanding how to navigate this paradox is the key to giving good Whip speeches. Excellent Whip speakers need to contribute something that is novel and important to the debate without violating the expectation against presenting new arguments. This is what successful summaries do.
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The Government and Opposition Whip speeches serve a similar purpose, but they are not entirely the same. The main function of both speeches is to present the audience with a way to look back at the debate that compels the audience to believe that one side is correct and the other is mistaken, and to do this in a manner that is both innovative and illuminating. But, because the Government Whip speaker is the only debater with an opportunity to refute the new arguments(i.e., extension material) presented by the Closing Opposition Team, the Government Whip speaker has a special obligation to refute any of these arguments that are worthy of refutation. In contrast, the Member of Government’s extension argument presumably will have been addressed by the Member of Opposition, so the Opposition Whip speaker has no symmetrical obligation to engage in this kind of refutation. The other significant difference between the two Whip speeches is that new lines of argument by the Opposition Whip are very likely to be entirely ignored by judges, while new lines of argument by the Government Whip are more likely to be merely discounted to some degree. New lines of argumentation are discouraged in both speeches because it is rather late in the debate to be introducing wholly new arguments, which could have been better explored had they been presented in the Member speeches. New lines of argument by the Opposition Whip are particularly discouraged because no one on the Government side will have any opportunity to refute those arguments.
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The diagram below summarizes the limitations and expectations of the Government and Opposition Whip speakers:
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思辨精英：英语辩论-构筑全球视角 [:1705132399]
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9.2 Summarizing: What to Discuss
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This text will discuss some general principles of what should be included in a summary, and will then describe three broad methods of summarizing. As with all elements of debate, no simple formula for how to construct a good summary exists. Multiple ways to execute a good summary are available to any creative debater. But, following these general rules will likely lead to a better and more persuasive speech.
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Whatever method is used to summarize the debate should allow the Whip speaker to directly compare both sides of the debate. A major danger, especially for new debaters, is to focus only on the good things that their side of the debate is offering, and not to directly compare these things to arguments that the other side is offering. A Whip speech that engages in direct comparison will, to some extent, acknowledge that the other side has some reasonable concerns, and will weigh those concerns with the advantages the Whip’s side is offering. For example, imagine that the Government Team in a debate is advocating making all recreational drugs legal, while taxing and regulating their sales. The Government side will likely discuss issues like the increased tax revenue that will pay for beneficial government programs, the diminished influence of organized crime, and the increased government respect for individual autonomy. The Opposition side will likely discuss issues like the increased use of drugs that are dangerous to users and bystanders, the destruction of individuals’ lives and innocent family members’ lives, and the promotion of corporations likely to be linked to organized crime. Presumably, the debate would also have been filled with a variety of objections to these arguments and responses to those objections. In that example, a good summary might compare the value of increased government respect for autonomy with the harm of more broken families due to drug use, or compare the two sides’views on how legalization would affect organized crime. The comparison may be about which values are more important (e.g., autonomy vs. family stability) or simply about what state of affairs is likely to occur (e.g., will organized crime grow or shrink?), but the point is that the summary should place the visions of the two sides next to each other so that they can be easily compared.
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Remember that one side does not need to win every point in order to be successful. Thus, the Whip speech can be an ideal time to admit to the audience that the other side does have one or more valid points about some issues in the debate. Still, the Whip speaker will want to avoid agreeing with the major arguments of the other side. Therefore, why might the Whip speaker want to grant the other side any points at all? Several reasons for such admissions are possible: 1) Agreeing takes much less time than trying to argue about every point; 2) if a particular side has not spent much time disputing an issue, agreeing can have the effect of trivializing the point in the minds of the audience; 3) most importantly, agreeing can sometimes significantly increase the Whip speaker’s ethos (i.e., credibility) as a speaker. In many situations, ethos is of tremendous value in a debate. One can think about the decision to accept an opponent’s argument in this way. If at least some good reasons did not exist on both sides of the motion, we wouldn’t be having the debate. Therefore, a debater cannot claim with much credibility that the other side has no good points. So, by willingly admitting that the other team has pointed out a real harm from taking his or her side, the Whip speaker is demonstrating that he or she is being genuinely rational and reasonable, and that the Whip speaker is not simply disagreeing with everything that the opponents say. When using this kind of strategy of agreeing with the best points of the opponent, the Whip speaker may demonstrate that the argument being admitted is clearly outweighed by the benefits gained, and so the position of the Whip speaker’s side is still clearly superior.
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The summary should not discuss everything in the debate that has been disputed, so the Whip speaker should identify which issue or issues will be discussed. Obviously, the Whip speaker will want to discuss those issues that are most important in the debate. The most important issues often are indicated by what the debaters have spent the most time talking about, however, the amount of time devoted to an issue is not always an indicator of what is actually most important. Asserting that something is an important issue means that the issue has the most relevance to which side of the debate an intelligent audience ought to believe. Thus, Whip speakers should generally not spend time discussing unimportant issues, except perhaps to very briefly point out why they are unimportant.
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At the same time, Whip speakers should focus on discussing the issues in the debate that are advantageous to their side. In most cases, both sides will have issues favorable to their respective sides. Because the Whip speakers want to persuade the audience that their side is correct, they probably will want to spend more time discussing the issues that most clearly support their side. However, focusing only on the arguments supporting the whip’s side of the debate should not be done to the extreme that the Whip speaker ignores important issues in the debate that are more supportive of the opposing side. If a Whip speaker focused only on the issues supportive of his or her side, the audience would correctly perceive that that speaker was simply avoiding the difficulties facing their side, and would not be persuaded. Instead of ignoring those issues, the Whip speaker should briefly but clearly explain why they are either irrelevant, relatively unimportant (i.e., outweighed by the other considerations), or mistaken. Presumably, other debaters on the same side have already tried to respond in these ways, and the Whip speaker should use the best responses to very briefly undermine the other side’s strongest arguments. Generally, good Whip speakers will spend most of their summary on issues that their side is winning, but will not ignore important issues just because their side is not prevailing on those issues.
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In a summary, as in all cases of refutation, a debater should spend as little time as possible restating or explaining the other side’s arguments. Ideally, the Whip speaker will be able to refer to opponents’ arguments with just a quick word or two. The point here is that the Whip speaker should not spend valuable speaking time re-explaining (and so, reinforcing) their opponents’arguments. Whip speakers will want to spend more time developing and explaining their own arguments. For example, even if each speaker on the other side spent three minutes talking about the injustice of capitalism because of the inevitable disparity between the rich and the poor, a Whip’s summary can refer to all of this argument as “injustice and inequality.” So, the Whip speaker might say something like “The opposition argued repeatedly that our plan would create unacceptable inequality, but they fail to appreciate the reality of modern economics; our economy is not a zero-sum game and we cannot possibly have both an efficient, prosperous society and complete equality.” Of course, the Whip speaker would then go on to explain this analysis more fully, but the point is that the speaker would not repeat the other side’s argumentation unless that speaker was going to show a specific flaw in their argument.
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Perhaps the most important general goal of a summary is to analyze the debate from a higher perspective. Competitive debates can often be seen as a series of disputes over the validity and importance of a wide range of arguments and objections to arguments, put forward by the four teams in the debate. Individual debaters often are concerned with the tactical conflict among these arguments and objections, and often have a tendency to focus on the details of those arguments and lose sight of the larger strategic perspective of how all these smaller argument conflicts affect the overarching question (i.e., the motion being debated). Importantly, the judges in the debate are probably taking the larger strategic perspective during the entire debate, and that larger perspective is certainly the one that the judges will attempt to take when trying to decide which team prevails. So, the job of the summary section of the Whip speech is primarily to guide the judges into a “big picture” perspective that will be beneficial to the Whip’s side and team. In order to guide the adjudicators to the bigger perspective, the summary needs to avoid the small conflicts in the debate and, instead, step back to look at what was most important in deciding who is right about the motion being debated. The Whip speaker needs to give the judges a new lens though which they can examine about 45 minutes of debating and more easily make sense of what are the important issues in the debate. Essentially, the summary section of the speech needs to rationally focus the judges’ attention and simplify the inevitable confusion created by 45 minutes of intense debating. For this reason, some refer to summarizing as “crystalizing.” The idea is that the process of crystallization can transform a liquid solution of particles that are disorganized and opaque into a solid well-organized object that is “crystal clear.”
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思辨精英：英语辩论-构筑全球视角 [:1705132400]
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9.3 Summarizing: How to Organize
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This section will discuss three common ways of constructing a Whip speech, ranging from simple and minimally effective to subtle and very effective. Although limitless methods to construct a summary exist, and although a great debater may offer an excellent summary that does not fall into any of the three categories, most coherent summaries fall into one of those three groups. This text will call the three methods: Repeating, Regrouping and Reframing.