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.