Abstract
This essay distinguishes "Debate" — competitive, tournament-driven, and governed by fixed procedural rules — from "debate," rhetoric's older practice of persuading an audience. Drawing on the dual etymology of "format" (to shape, and to arrange data for machine processing) and on Goodhart's law, the essay argues that competitive format has displaced audience assent as debate's real aim, training students to satisfy a judge's rules rather than move real listeners. As an alternative, it proposes a co-curricular model rooted in the university rather than the tournament circuit, treating rules as adaptable paradigms rather than algorithms to execute. Drawing on Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's universal audience and speculative frameworks — including a sophistic model built on kairos and playfulness, and a cooperative model inspired by Winnicott's "Squiggle Game" — the essay reimagines evaluation around audience engagement and shared meaning-making rather than procedural conformity.
First Page
1
Last Page
14
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Llano, S. M.
(2026).
Debating without format: A portrait, a propsal, a possibility.
Communication and Theater Association of Minnesota Journal, 49(2), 1-14.
https://doi.org/10.56816/2471-0032.1191