A speaker’s visual presentation is an important aspect of a speaker’s credibility, and a speaker who seems more credible will be a speaker who is more convincing. You should avoid wide gestures, vicious head shaking, and audible speaking during rounds when your opponents are speaking—it subtracts from your credibility as a speaker.

Eye contact (or the lack of it, to be more precise!) This means that you should be making eye contact with specific members of your audience, and holding that eye contact for an appropriate length of time (generally, anywhere from 5 to 30 seconds). Any more than that, and audience members may begin to feel a little creeped out, while less may present itself as insecurity. There are a number of ways that a speaker can fail to make effective eye contact. Behavior such as reading notes word for word, flickering eyes between your notes and the audience, speaking solely to your opponents, or scouring the room for other objects to look at (a window, a chair, etc.) all mean that there is a lack of appropriate eye contact.

• It can often be very tempting to grip your notes with both hands, especially when you are nervous. However, this serves only to limit your natural tendency to gesture.
• Keep your gestures natural–In everyday conversation, we do not deliberately choreograph gestures to match our words (for example, by sweeping your hands outwards above your head when discussing ‘the entire world’!). It therefore seems unnatural and insincere to pay significant attention to specific gestures during your speech.
• Don’t overuse gestures or repetitively shake your hand or head.
• Remember to not fiddle with anything—clothing, hair, accessories—it takes away from the overall visual presentation.

The most important aspect of an effective stance is that you are natural. Speakers may want to consider details of stance, such as the position of their feet, the distribution of their weight, and the straightness of their back.

Clarity is by far the most important element of verbal presentation. You should be concerned with the actual content and words used to convey ideas rather than their pronunciations. Too many debaters use long or difficult words and convoluted sentences in order to sound impressive. In reality, this just makes it harder for the audience to follow and painfully difficult to understand.

The only exception is the issue of movement. There is no rule that requires you to stand rooted to one spot as you speak—you are welcome to move around the floor. However, you must avoid distracting or repetitive movements, such as pacing up and down, shifting your weight from one foot to the other, circling the room in the same spot, or swaying. The speaker’s triangle strategy, is one where the debater utilizes physical movement patterns to reinforce what they are saying. It can look like moving to different points on the stage during transitions, forming what often resembles the figure of a triangle.