What is forensics?
I like the way the University of Oregon’s team describes it:
Forensics, from the Latin forensis meaning ‘in open court, public’ and closely related to the term forum, is the practice of argumentation and public speaking.
University of Oregon Forensics Team
Forensics, simply, is interscholastic speech and debate. Depending on whether you’re talking about junior high school, senior high school, or college, there are many different events that are included in forensics. There are several different types of debate: policy, parliamentary, Lincoln-Douglas, etc. And there are many kinds of individual and group speech events: impromptu, extemporaneous, poetry interpretation, informative, and so on.
Part of what I intend to do with this site is to give some “lessons I’ve learned” to pass along to the next generation of tournament directors. What’s a tournament director? Someone who oversees or assigns competitors and judges to virtual or real rooms; coordinates with the host when it comes to securing rooms, judges, and all that’s necessary to run a tournament; oversees or tabulates results; deals with questions and complaints, and ensures that there are enough topics for certain events. It’s basically like running a mini-convention each weekend for lots of people, only you have to tell them where to go once they tell you what they want to do, and make sure you have enough critics to evaluate their performance. Each of those items merit discussion of their own. With COVID, we’ve learned even more about different types of tournament models. I’ll talk about those too.