About Speech Night 2025

Those speaking tonight are mostly students of a course titled “Compare, Persuade, Debate.” In the first semester students studied literature from different genres, time periods and countries, with the purpose of encouraging students to see the continuity of older literature with the new as well as to understand the “Zeitgeist” of particular periods despite cultural and language differences, the course will present plays, short stories, novels, essays, and poems that have obvious similarities. The student, however, was encouraged to take note of the differences between the works and draw conclusions regarding the significance of those differences (and similarities), such as culture, period, the author’s creative genius, etc. The year’s reading included works by such authors as William Shakespeare, Goethe, Coleridge, Keats, Nicolai Gogol, Leo Tolstoy and others. In the second semester, the class reading and writing assignments instructed students on logic, logical fallacies, persuasive arguments and debate.

     In addition to writing persuasive and debate positions, students were assigned a good number of essays to write on a particular topic—expository, musings, comparison, narrative, and persuasive. What you see tonight is a pot pourri of assignments turned into speeches. 

     It is so unfortunate that most schools across the U.S. focus on only one or two essay formats and almost always on the five-paragraph literary analysis. It puzzles me, frankly, why this essay is the one schools always fall back on, as it is the least practical and not really “writing” per se. Students are often asked to write an essay on some modern work of fiction and to analyze it with the all-important caveat—be sure to use textual evidence and cite your sources, or points will be docked! I think it is wonderful for students to learn to think logically and back up their ideas to prove a point. I also think that it is important research tool to learn how to cite a source. But what lawyers do is not at the core of writing—writing formulaic proof texts; rather it is to move a reader or audience emotionally and intellectually through our words and voice. Robert Frost once said, “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” I doubt that writing literary analysis ever teaches students Robert Frost’s wisdom.