Understanding the Spread
Random Short-Attention-Span Thoughts
To begin, full transparency. I have never been on a debate team—high school, college, NDSA (National Debate and Speech Association), LOOM (Loyal Order of the Moose), or otherwise. (More on the LOOM, perhaps, in a subsequent blog.) I have also not given debate a second thought (or even a first) since my eighth-grade civics class. That is, I had not given it any thought until a few days ago, when I read the Kindle sample from Ben Lerner’s novel The Topeka School. The novel, as you might have guessed, chronicles the life of a high school debate champion named Adam Gordon.
What I found interesting about the sample, besides the excellent writing, was the debate art of “spreading.” Lerner describes how debate team members attempt to “spread” their opponents, that is, “make more arguments, marshal more evidence than the other team can respond to within the allotted time.” Spreading is done by accelerating their speech to a “nearly unintelligible speed, pitch, and volume.” He also describes the lengths that debaters go to hone their spreading skills:
Competitive debaters spend hours doing speed drills—holding a pen in their teeth while reading, which forces the tongue to work harder, the mouth to over-enunciate; they practiced reading backward so as to uncouple the physical act of vocalization from the effort to comprehend, which slows one down.
As a national champion debater, Lerner knows his topic, noting, for example, that one debater opposing Gordon read his evidence at 340 words per minute. He also notes how spreading is not limited to debate:
Corporate persons deployed a version of the spread all the time: for they [students] heard the spoken warnings at the end of increasingly common television commericals for prescription drugs, when risk information is disclosed at a speed designed to make it difficult to comprehend; they heard the list of rules and caveats read rapid-fire at the end of promotions on the radio; they were are least vaguely familiar with the “fine print” one received from financial institutions and health-insurance companies; the last thing one was supposed to do with those thousands of words was comprehend them.
In case you’re contemplating taking up debate or just expanding the content of your dinner-table conversations exponentially, the Atlanta Urban Debate website offers speed drills you can practice. Several of them are the ones Lerner mentions in his novel. These suggest, for example, that you “practice reading words without understanding what those words are saying” because you can speak faster if “your brain doesn’t have to comprehend what the text says.” The list also includes drills to improve clarity, which “helps ensure that the judge can understand every word that a debater is saying, even if the debater is talking at a fast pace.” These include the pen-in-mouth drill Lerner described and an “over-exaggeration” drill.
If you think speaking 340 words per minute is mind-boggling, meet Sean Shannon, who now holds the Guinness World Record for talking fast. In August 1995, Shannon read a soliloquy from Hamlet at 655 words per minute. Specifically, he recited 269 words in 23.8 seconds. His record has appeared to stand since then.
I feel fortunate to have stumbled across the concept of spreading in Lerner’s novel. I’ve been looking for something new to help preserve my brain’s plasticity and my tongue’s nimbleness—the former needs increasing help as we age, and the latter, well, let’s just say that if I can untie my tongue and improve my enunciability to some degree by putting a BIC in my mouth and speaking quickly, my family and friends will appreciate it, even if they find it a tad odd to watch.
(Image: Edited version of photograph of American actor Edwin Booth as William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, circa 1870. Public domain.)