assigned to him and give himself immediately to refuting the arguments just made.  Then his points must be left to his colleagues, and they must be able to use them to effect.  Likewise a team should know the strong points on the other side as well as on its own, and come to the platform primed with arguments to meet them.  In intercollegiate contests, to insure this fore-knowledge of the other side the speakers as part of their preparation meet men from their own college who argue out the other side in detail and at length.  In a triangular contest each team from a college has the advantage of having worked up the subject in actual debate against the other.  The more thoroughly you have worked up both sides of the question, the less likely are you to be taken by surprise by some argument which you do not know how to meet.

64.  On the Platform.  When it comes to the actual debate experience shows that speeches committed to memory are almost always ineffective as compared with extemporaneous speaking.  Even when your confidence is not disturbed by a slippery memory there is an impalpable touch of the artificial about the prepared speech which impairs its vitality.  On the other hand, especially with the first speeches on each side, you cannot get to your feet and trust entirely to the inspiration of the moment; you must have something thought out.  One of the most notable lecturers in Harvard University prepares his lectures in a way which is an excellent model for debaters.  He writes out beforehand a complete analytical and tabulated plan of his lecture, similar to the briefs which have been recommended here in Chapter II, with each of the main principles of his lecture, and with the subdivisions and illustrations inserted.  Then he leaves this outline at home and talks from a full and well-ordered mind.  Some such plan is the best possible one for the main speeches in a debate.  Often the plan can be most easily prepared by writing out the argument in full; and this expansion of the argument has the added advantage of providing you with much of your phrasing.  But it is better not to commit the complete argument to memory:  the brief of it, if thoroughly digested and so studied as to come readily to mind, is enough.  Then practice, practice, practice, will give the ease and fluency that you need.

The rebuttal should always be extemporaneous.  Even if you have foreseen the strongest points made by your opponent and prepared yourself to meet them, you cannot foresee just the way he will make the points.  Nothing is more awkward in a debate than to begin with a few obviously extemporaneous remarks, and then to let loose a little speech which has been kept, as it were, in cold storage, and which just misses fitting the speech to which it should be an answer.  It is better to make the rebuttal a little less sweeping than it might be and have it fall pat on the speech which it is attacking.  Ready and spontaneous skill in rebuttal is the final excellence of debating.  At the same time the skill should be so natural that wit and good humor may have their chance.  If from the beginning you practice making your speeches in rebuttal offhand, you will constantly gain in confidence when you are called on to speak.