Verbal debate is oftentimes considered the most ideal form of communication among individuals who disagree with each other, especially in western civilization.
I do understand why this is so, for a couple of obvious reasons. When people are directly speaking to one another face-to-face, they can read each other's facial expressions and body languages, as well as various phonetic nuances that cannot be conveyed through written language. Also, the nature of speech keeps things concise and direct, allowing arguments to be settled in a more decisive manner than through a painstaking back-and-forth exchange of written words. Yet, I would like to suggest some of the downsides of this medium of communication.
Some highly opinionated gentlemen, who would rather identify themselves as cross-bearers of their own side of the political spectrum than as individuals who possess their own independent thoughts, often claim that today's society is raising a generation of indoctrinated snowflakes who have lost every ability to engage in a "healthy conversation", due to their ever-growing habit of perpetually reiterating their own dogma inside their own circle of kindred minds.
These honorable patriots, who somehow happened to acquire the most profound wisdom of the universe despite having the privilege of spending their younger years during the most prosperous epoch of the most prosperous state of the entire human history, back up this claim by coming up with video footages of young college students who refuse to fully participate in a face-to-face "political conversation" which suddenly popped out of nowhere in the midst of a random campus area. Such "evidences" of the incompetence of today's young intellectuals, for sure, are not difficult to obtain because the ones who started off such a seemingly random debate are the ones who were the most meticulously prepared for it, while those "spoiled kids" just happened to be on their way to their next lecture in which they were about to focus their mental energy on their mission to carry on the legacy of their older generations.
I am personally not a fan of verbal debate not necessarily because I am not particularly talented in speech, but because its original purpose can be severely distorted due to many factors. Unless every participant of a verbal discussion is well prepared for its subject, gentle enough to not cut off others while they are speaking, careful not to judge the other speaker's intellect based upon his/her voice, accents, and speed of verbal articulation, as well as generous enough to understand that it is not always about "winning an argument", it is a matter of time until the whole conversation degrades into some kind of superficial dexterity competition, in which whoever comes up with a series of most immediately convincing arguments as quickly as possible is considered the greatest speaker (regardless of whether or not they really turn out to be valid arguments when analyzed later on).