First Post

As I was considering the possible subjects for this blog, one of my starting points was the activities I'm involved in, since they seemed like good examples of topics that I would know about from experience and that I could write about for a while. There were two main options: band and debate.

I was reluctant to focus on band or music, not because I don't like it as much, but because the opportunities for talking about other topics seemed limited - there isn't really a clear connection from marching band to Hamlet, for example.

At first, debate didn't really seem any more promising - I would probably enjoy writing about my experiences in debate, but a blog about the details of the activity would not have been particularly accessible or interesting to anybody who wasn't already familiar with policy debate. So rather than writing a blog about debate, I considered what I felt I had learned from debate over the last two years. While I like to think that debate has made me better informed about politics and current events, its main benefit has been teaching me to think about and make argument, a set of skills that seems both more accessible and more applicable to English class.

I'm hoping I can apply some of these skills by writing about various issues from the perspective of a debater. This does not mean that I will focus on the specifics of the activity of debate like giving speeches and writing files. Instead, I plan to write about how different sides of an issue make their arguments, what their arguments are and whether those arguments are compelling.