It is impossible to prove the issues until we have found them, but equally impossible to show the audience what the issues are until we have shown what the thing is which we wish those issues to support.  First, then, let us see what we mean by making perfectly clear what you wish to have the audience believe.

Suppose that you should meet a friend who says to you:  “I am going to argue with you about examinations.”  You might naturally reply:  “What examinations?” If he should say, “All examinations:  the honor system in all examinations,” you might very reasonably still be puzzled and ask if by all examinations he meant examinations of every kind in grade school, high school, and college, as well as the civil service examinations, and what was meant by the honor system.

He would now probably explain to you carefully how several schools have been experimenting with the idea of giving all examinations without the presence of a teacher or monitor of any sort.  During these examinations, however, it has been customary to ask the students themselves to report any cheating that they may observe.  It is also required that each student state in writing, at the end of his paper, upon honor, that he has neither given nor received aid during the test.  “To this method,” your friend continues, “has been given the name of the honor system.  And I believe that this system should be adopted in all examinations in the Greenburg High School.”

He has now stated definitely what he wishes to make you believe, and he has done more; he has explained to you the meaning of the terms that you did not understand.  These two things make perfectly clear to you what he wishes you to believe, and he has thus covered the first step in argumentation.

From this illustration, then, several rules can be drawn.  In the first place your friend stated that he wished to argue about examinations.  Why could he not begin his argument at once?  Because he had not yet asked you to believe anything about examinations.  He might have said, “I am going to explain examinations,” and he could then have told you what examinations were.  That would have been exposition.  But he could not argue until he had made a definite assertion about the term “examination.”

Rule one would then be:  State in the form of a definite assertion the matter to be argued.

In order to be suitable for debating, an assertion or, as it is often called, proposition, of this kind should conform to certain conditions: 

1.  It should be one in which both the debaters and the audience are interested.  Failure to observe this rule has caused many to think debating a dry subject.

2.  It should propose something different from existing conditions.  Argument should have an end in view.  Your school has no lunchroom.  Should it have one?  Your city is governed by a mayor and a council.  Should it be ruled by a commission?  Merely to debate, as did the men of the Middle Ages, how many angels could dance on the point of a needle, or, as some more modern debaters have done, whether Grant was a greater general than Washington, is useless.