My 10th Grade Debate Speech

TOPIC: Literature in all its forms - novels, stories, poems and drama - are useless and have no signifigance in later life

MY STAND: For

TIME: 4 minutes

As a debator on this topic I will be speaking for the movement.

Literature in all its forms are useless and have no signifigance in later life. It is a fact that can't possibly be denied even by the most avid of literature lovers! Literature can't be to ANY practical usage in our later lives. Ten years from now, apart from that tiny 1% of the world's population who would walk the literary path, the rest of us would end up scientist, IT experts and doctors. Do we NEED R.L.Stine's Fear Street to operate a computer? Does a doctor NEED Tresure Island to cure a patient?

The answer is a blatant : No.

Before we go any further, you'd probably want to know, what IS literature? - The written or printed production of the human mind, figments of someone's imagination, fiction.

Today we've got dozen's of award winning novels. Does Stephenie Meyer's 'Twilight' series ring a bell? J.K. Rowling's 'Harry Potter'? Or Meg Cabot's 'Princess Diaries'? These writers create a world of their own, conjuring up tales of romance, love, mystery, suspense and horror... They are illusionary, fictitious! By drawing us into the story, people get influenced and develop UNREALISTIC goals - especially us teenagers - towards disastrous lifestyles.

Shake your heads all you like but its TRUE and its HAPPENING! There are some teenagers who get so carried away by tales of gory murders and killers without a conscience that they actually carry out massacres to get the so-called 'adrenaline rush' like certain characters of some books.

We've got a generation on our hands who think these novels are the best things that have ever happened to them. DON'T YOU GET IT? This is a writer's aim. To make you buy their books so that THEY profit. Lack of your interest equals to a lack of their income. It's all a parade done on a monetary basis. What about us - the consumers? What are WE buying? Someone imagined something and got it printed out in a five hundred page novel! Great way to blow a HUNDRED BUCKS, right?

Speaking of five-hundred paged novels...did you know that a novel THAT big uses up half a tree? At this rate there's no telling WHEN we'll deplete the Earth of ALL it's trees!

Getting back to the topic, I think I've spoken enough about contemporary literature, now let's take a look at the classics. How about SHakespeares 'Romeo and Juliet'? A tragic love story that has captivated the hearts of many. WHY? It's just a story! You can barely understand the old and OBSOLETE English it is written in and it is completely irrelevant in today's times. No-one wants to read boring outdated books and poetry anymore. It's not like we're going to run around yelling ," Romeo! Romeo! Where art thou Romeo? "

Who would spend hours with a book when modernisation has made discotheques, shopping malls, movie halls and gaming arcades available to us ALL?

Numerous literary scholars spend HOURS trying to decipher Old English. A COMPLETE waste of time in a world where spoken English has been replaced by slangs. On top of that they spend HOURS more pondering over poetry by Plath and Yeats trying to decipher the hidden meanings behind the surface. They should come to realise that the true message poetry hides can only be TRULY understood by the poet and the person the poem is adressed to.

Shouldn't WE be focusing on saving the Earth from Global Warming? Finding a cure for cancer? Improving technology? If literature WERE at all useful, wouldn't it in someway be able to help us solve these problems? Let's face it, the truth is - It can't. It is a waste of precious time and energy which could be utilesed for something else, something better, something worthwhile...

Therefore we can conclude that literature is not beneficial to us in ANY way, not in our present lives nor in our future ones.

NOTE: Although this is MY speech, I have to confess, I'M A LITERATURE LOVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!