Front Matter5 January 2026
Speaker & Gavel (ISSN 2572-4460) is the scholarly journal of the Novice National Forensic Association, a non-profit collegiate forensic organization dedicated to intercollegiate speech and debate students in their first year of college competition. Speaker & Gavel encourages contributions from forensic scholars and practitioners, who comprise all segments of the journal's readership, including graduate school, community college, and college or university groups.
This journal is exclusively online and open access to decrease the cost of spreading important scholarly discussions. The NNFA encourages scholars to use and make reference to work published in our journal. Scholars may quote, without permission, in order to document their own work. Speaker & Gavel assumes each scholar shall be responsible in acknowledging and properly documenting such uses. Teachers may reproduce and distribute, free of copyright charges, portions of this journal solely for educational purposes. Any reproduction and distribution must acknowledge in writing Speaker & Gavel as the primary source of the material.
For more information contact the editor, Todd Holm: toddtholm@gmail.com.
Speaker & Gavel was preceded by two separate titles, The Gavel of Delta Sigma Rho and The Speaker of Tau Kappa Alpha. In 1964, the two separate titles merged to form Speaker and Gavel. The publication continued in print until 2004 when it transitioned to an online only format.
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Volume 61, Issue 2 (2025)View issue
Current Articles
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Articles
13 March 2016
Reading is Remembering: The Effect of Reading vs. Watching News on Memory and Metamemory
From which news medium can audiences acquire information best? To what extent does the news source affect receivers’ feelings of knowing? Will the effect of a news source on confidence in knowledge, if any, stay over time? Exposure to either print or electronic news media is a daily habit for an average person in today’s world. Computerized news transmitted via networks and online services led to more diversification in news presentations. Such diversity inspired many scholars to investigate the comparative effectiveness of news media on memory processes. The study reported here examines the effect of exposure to different news media on the variance in subjects’ levels of recall immediately after exposure and two hours later. The three media used in the experiment are television, newspapers, and computer. Special attention to subjects’ metamemory, or their awareness of what they have learned is also given in this paper. Metamemory is tested immediately after exposure, and two hours later.Articles
16 December 2015
Obama Transforming: Using Functional Theory to Identify Transformational Leadership
The 2008 presidential campaign convention speeches broke records as viewers flocked to the speeches by Obama, Palin, and McCain in numbers that rivaled American Idol ratings. Adapting functional theory (Benoit, 2007) to include transformational leadership characteristics (Bass & Avolio, 1990), President Obama‘s 2008 nomination acceptance speech was used test the adapting of functional theory for analyzing leadership claims. Secondary data were used as evidentiary support of Obama‘s efforts to make changes once in the White House. Results are discussed and framed within functional theory and transfor-mational leadership.Articles
1 February 2016
Critiquing Debate
Debaters enjoy debating more than debate itself. The closer one gets to be-coming ―"an old debater" (a category to which I will inevitably have to resign myself sooner or later), the more likely we are to find ourselves debating on the side of ―"the way debate used to be" or ―"the way debate is supposed to be." I don‘t malign this seemly inevitable progression or even my place in it. I think the tendency to re-examine ourselves says something about our activity. I enter this debate about debate, I think I should begin by defining my side of the flow, or to at least identify which side of the flow I am attacking. My purpose is not to condemn debating or to defend the good old days of debate. Rather I hope to engage in a critique of the activity. Debaters are familiar with critique, often spelled with a ―"k", as an attack upon the philosophical or ideological assumptions of the opponent‘s argument but critiques exist outside the world of debate as well and their purpose is not merely to win arguments. Critique, as Ingram and Simon-Ingram (1992) noted, aims ―"at emancipating … addresses from ideology" (p. xxviii) and McKerrow (1989) argued the practice of critical rhetoric is ―"to unmask or demystify the discourse of power" and ―"to understand the integration of power/knowledge in society" (p. 91). My critique is concerned not with what is good or bad debating, but with how debate constructs ―"a particular vision of the world" and the ―"forms of power … embraced or implicated" (McKerrow, 2001, p. 621) by the activity. Specifically, the focus of my effort is on the practice of competitive debating, in particular how debate practices control and organize knowledge in fundamentally undemocratic ways.Articles
20 July 2020
Exploring the Impacts of an Open Door Policy and a Mindfulness Room at the Intercollegiate Speech (Individual Events) Tournament
Two distinct tournament features were offered at a regional intercollegiate individual events swing: 1.) an open door policy for all competition rounds and 2.) a mindfulness room for students. A 16-item survey (with both qualitative and quantitative prompts) was administered at the conclusion of the swing to gain a sense of participants’ perceptions of past tournament experiences and experiences with the newly implemented features. Seventy-one (n=71) respondents participated (competitors, coaches, tournament staff, and hired judges). Analysis of the data revealed: 40% of participants had felt the need to leave a round in the past (a disproportionate 80% of which were women, nonbinary, or genderqueer), a clear quantitative increase in perceived confidence that competitors felt to leave the room as needed after the reading of the open door policy, judges and students had divergent perceptions on the effectiveness of the open door policy, and while the mindfulness room concept was praised, the main criticisms were the size and levels of accessibility to the room. The authors offer suggestions for administering an open door policy and a mindfulness room in a forensics context.Articles
16 December 2015
How Attorneys Judge Collegiate Mock Trials
In collegiate mock trial competition, practicing attorneys who don’t coach or know the participating schools judge the students' persuasive skill. Fifty-six attorneys were interviewed after they judged collegiate mock trials. They were asked which student behaviors they rewarded, which behaviors they punished, and overall which team presented more effectively. The attorneys' responses were grouped into thematic categories and arranged by priorities. Attorneys were consistent in what they said they valued in student performances. Interviewees' answers to the question about overall team performance were compared with the numeric ballots. If global assessment were included, it would change the outcome of a substantial number of trials, which raises the question if such an item would have the same effect on any graded competition.Articles
7 September 2017