Keeping Their Attention: A Judging Analysis

by Colin West

Every extemper has, at some point, received a ballot after a tournament and wondered “was my judge even listening to my speech?” I know I have. But now that I have moved from the realm of high school competition into the pool of college judges, I can tell you the answer. They weren’t listening. At least, not to all of it.

Of course it is rarely the case that judges are simply tuning out for long passages of your speech. More likely, they are distracted by writing comments on your ballot, by trying to remember what time signal to give next, or because you said something so clever that it caused them to spontaneously recall an article they read in last month’s New Yorker. But the result is the same:  a few seemingly random moments from your speech will have a great deal of influence on your final score; the rest is simply background.

What this means for you, as a competitor, is that you need to think more like your teacher does when he or she prepares a lesson plan. After all, it’s not easy to get teenagers to focus on anything for more than 15 seconds, unless “Pimp My Ride” and “Panic! At the Disco” are somehow both simultaneously involved. Applying this strategy starts at the very top of your outline, with the intro. Of course, it’s a well-known fact that the introduction serves as an “attention getter.” But such devices generally serve as just this and nothing more: they grab the judge’s attention momentarily, but relinquish it moments later when the speaker moves on to more substantive (read as: “boring”) issues.

There are a couple of steps which can be taken to remedy this. One is the use of a “divided” or  ” suspended”  intro-one which begins with something funny but leaves an unanswered question to be answered later in the speech. Naturally, care must be taken not to make the introduction seem incomplete, but I suspect that many extempers have seen their teachers do just this. They begin the lesson with a joke or a fun fact about the subject at hand, and then hint at the prospect of an even funnier story, or an even more curious piece of trivia. The students are left waiting for the resolution, which forces them to pay more attention as the lesson goes along, never knowing when they might hear the completion of the story. In your case, the second punchline can be used to frame the speech in the conclusion, or perhaps in the transition between the second and third point.

Another, less radical technique is the oft-discussed (and yet wildly underused) concept of a significance statement: a short (one or two sentence) explanation of the relevance, urgency, and scope of the problem being discussed. Many extempers do not use such a device at all, and those who do frequently mistake it as an opportunity to show the judge that they, personally, know the topic is important. Much more than that, a significance statement gives you the chance to transcend the extemp round: you can convince your judge that your question is so urgent and so relevant to his life as an average American that it would be worth 7 minutes of his time to hear the topic discussed even if he weren’t being paid to do it. Of course, not all topics lend themselves to this as well as others. But if you can make your judge feel a moment of personal concern about the issue (“my goodness! That’s really how big my daughter’s share of the national debt will be by the time she is 18?”) then there is a good chance you will hold their attention much more tightly.

Naturally, the strongest introduction in the world will not carry your speech if the content is still vaguely narcotic. Just as it happens in a classroom, strings of statistics or cascading citations have a way of putting one’s brain into a brief hibernation. I suspect the same is true for some judges: after years and years of hearing students make a claim, cite evidence to support it, and repeat for 3-4 minutes at a time, even the best judges start to pay less attention to the substance of the citations.  For example, when a student says “the economy is getting worse,” the judge, feeling that the statement is intuitively true, probably feels there is no real need to pay as much attention as the student proceeds to cite figure after figure about inflation, GDP, and job loss. Of course, there are times when that is a good thing. After all, everyone has given a speech from time to time where their citations struggled to bear the weight of their analysis, and at times like those it can be nice when a judge takes your evidence for granted. On the other hand, there is something terribly tragic about delivering that perfect piece of evidence-a uniquely calculated figure pulled from a highly respected report-only to discover that the judge was busy jotting down your competitor code because they forgot to do it at the start of the round.

To compensate for this, you have to give your best citations a little something extra to make sure they hang in the air long enough for your judge to appreciate them. This amounts to a sort of “mini-significance statement,” except in this case, your goal is to get the judge to internalize the information rather than simple acknowledge the fact that you used a citation. Here are a couple examples of the classic “benchmarking” technique:

• Break down large economic figures in terms of the wealth of some famous person. Example: “the New York Times reports that the war in Iraq is costing us $10 billion each month. That means that even if Bill Gates himself began personally funding the war in Iraq, he would be out of money in 6 months. In fact, he would be over 2 billion dollars in debt.
• Numbers of people can be described people in terms of well-known cities, as in “since the start of 2008, 1.2 million jobs have been lost. This is the same number of people affected as if every man, woman, and child in Denver had been simultaneously fired-twice.”

You will note a number of common threads in these two examples. First, the “real” statistic should always be clearly presented before it is put into any unusual comparisons. This gives the speech a nice balance between both academic rigor and relatability. Secondly, each example given withholds a little bit of information until the very end, to heighten the overall impact. In other words, just as the judge is beginning to process the fact that Bill gates personal fortune could only support the Iraq war for half a year, he is told that in fact, Mr. Gates would fall two billion dollars short of his goal. And right when he has started to imagine firing every person alive in Denver, he is told that the number of people he is picturing is (to quote The Grinch) too sizes too small.

Of course, this benchmarking technique requires you to either memorize or carry with you a list of easily conceptualized figures: The population of China, the number of Americans killed in world war two, or perhaps the price of gasoline in 1960. Care must be taken also to ensure that you have benchmarks at a number of different scales. You don’t want, for example, to end up saying that “one one-hundred-thousandth of the earth’s population has been killed in the war on terror.” Still, with the investment of a little work at the outset, you will find that when these comparisons are sprinkled judiciously throughout a speech, it can do a great deal to draw the speech out of the realm of the abstract and make it hit closer to home. After all, are you going to forget the story about Bill Gates and the Iraq war anytime soon?

Of course, at no point in the speech is it more important to grab your judge’s attention than in the conclusion. Particularly if you have had the misfortune of going first, you will want to leave the room having just finished the best lines of your speech. A fantastic introduction will be long forgotten if you were forced to limp across the 7-minute finish line.

In addition to the tried-and-true method of returning to a theme from the introduction, it can work well to end your speech with some forward-looking analysis. Where do we go from here to address the problems you were discussing? What groups would you call to action on this issue? Extending your analysis like this helps convey that you are not just engaging this topic in order to win the round-you genuinely believe that global action must be taken with respect to whatever topic you have chosen to address. On the other side of the coin, you can end on a very hopeful note by painting a brief picture where the world has followed your advice-a handy way of summarizing the arguments in favor of your position in concrete terms. In either case, do not fail to memorize the last line of your speech. If, like me, you often find yourself running on autopilot and improvising your way through the last two minutes of your speech, having the last line planned out can be a wonderful way to make sure that you stick the landing.

Of course to many people, these techniques and strategies are old news. Nevertheless, When I judge, I never fail to be amazed at how infrequently I find myself truly absorbed in a competitor’s speech-and I am an admitted policy wonk. A few simple steps (a significance statement in the introduction, a flashy comparison to highlight a key statistic, and a passionate, well-rehearsed conclusion) can easily compensate for analytical weakness early in an extemper’s career. And more importantly, they can make the difference between the hundreds of intelligent, successful extempers across the country and the proud few who get to speak in the coveted final rounds. So when you rehearse your speech, ask yourself: if I heard this speech in one of my classes, would I be hooked? Or would I be texting my girlfriend covertly under the table?

If the answer is the latter, consider making some changes. Or at the very least, make your judge keep his hands where you can see them.