A beginner’s year: from a shaky reply speech to breaking at Nottingham

I gave my first speech at the Union in second week of Michaelmas, and I remember almost none of it. I know the motion was about compulsory voting, I know I spoke fourth, and I know I sat down ninety seconds early because I had simply run out of things to say. The chair wrote "good instincts, no structure" on my feedback slip. She was being kind about the instincts.

What kept me coming back wasn't a sudden breakthrough. It was that the feedback was specific. Not "be more confident" — actually useful things. Stop introducing arguments with "I feel like". Pick two points, not five. Answer the POI, then get out; don't negotiate with it.

By the end of Michaelmas I could fill seven minutes. By the middle of Hilary I could fill them with roughly one argument too many, which the judges reliably noticed. The habit that fixed it was one an older member suggested: after every debate, write down the single sentence you'd keep from your speech and the single sentence the best speaker in the room said. Two sentences. I have a notebook of them now and it's the most useful thing I own.

In Trinity I entered the Nottingham IV with a partner from my college who'd been debating for exactly as long as I had. We prepped by doing case files on the bus. We broke 15th of 16 breaking teams, lost the quarter on a 3–0, and I have never been so pleased with a loss in my life. The call went against us for reasons we could name — we won an argument nobody weighed — and being able to name the reason felt like the actual achievement.

If you're reading this deciding whether to come on Thursday: the gap between watching and speaking feels enormous and is about three weeks wide. Everyone in that room gave a first speech once, and most of them sat down early too.