by Monica Coscia
Monica Coscia competed in extemp for Montville Township High School in Montville, New Jersey. She was the 2014 NCFL National Champion in extemp, state runner-up in United States extemp, and the extemp CFL point leader for the Newark district. She also has broken at Yale, Princeton, and Harvard and has coached middle school forensics. Monica now studies political science and history in the honors program at Boston College and competes on the mock trial team.
The best part about winning the NCFL extemp championship wasn’t the trophy or the title. It wasn’t being the first national champion for my school and my amazing coach, although that was a close second. Rather, the legacy that I hope I left with my NCFL championship is the lesson that, even in the world of competitive speech and debate, the underdogs can win. CFL Nationals, unlike other prestigious tournaments like NSDA Nationals and the TOC, is anyone’s tournament to win. This is not to say that one can win the title without practice and effort, but you don’t necessarily need years of speech camp and tons of national tournament breaks to be successful here. Sure, I had broken at a few national tournaments, finaled at states, and had been to NCFLs once before, but I had never broken past semis at a national tournament. It’s difficult to ignore the fact that people say I shouldn’t have won, but I would like to believe that this wasn’t a complete fluke. I knew who my audience was, and I catered to that audience. The key to this tournament is being cognizant of who you are speaking to, and gearing your already talented skill set to them. I hope that the following advice is even the least bit helpful to your participation in NCFLs, because anyone who truly dedicates his/herself to practicing for this tournament has the ability succeed here.
I overheard a competitor at NCFLs last year give some final advice to his teammate before a round: “speak pretty, it’s NCFLs.” This statement wasn’t false–strong delivery is essential to this tournament. With this come a few caveats. First, strong delivery does not necessarily mean you should sacrifice strong analysis. Just because your judges may have less extemp experience than those at other tournaments does not mean you can dumb your speeches down to a bare minimum. Take a strong middle ground between being simplistic and overly esoteric–make your points easily digestible, explain complicated concepts, and talk with the judge rather than at them. I incorporated a strategy to condense my analyses in my preparation for NCFLs: after I read an article that I planned on filing, I would talk to myself and sum up in a sentence or two what I had just read and why it was important. Condensing is the name of the game: if your points can be summed up by a one- or two-word tagline, it’s more likely that the judge will follow your analysis. At CFLs, it’s imperative to go back to the basics and remember that extemp is about persuasion. A CFL judge is unlikely to buy your argument if you’re using SAT vocabulary or convoluted economic concepts without explaining what they mean. In terms of analysis at the actual competition, there are a few strategies that the judges at CFLs take a liking to. In each one of my speeches, I coined at least one term–introducing a complicated concept like “zombie banks” or “federalization,” defining it, and explaining why it applies to your question. This does wonders for establishing your ethos and will probably teach the judge something he/she didn’t already know. Signposting (i.e. explicitly answering the question in the first sentence of your three point: “The first reason why the United States should increase funding to Amtrak is because…”) is a great, underrated tool as well, giving the judge a break in between your points and allowing them to follow the trail of your argument. Finally, to address something that all extempers including myself tend to forget, if you remember one thing, remember to impact. At the end of each point, expressly tell your judges why what you’ve just said in the last ninety seconds has bearing on the slip of paper in front of them. A good number of the judges who ranked me highly at NCFLs wrote on their ballots that they appreciated my impacting each point. At this tournament, you should not rely on the judges to make the connections to your question themselves. NCFLs are also notorious for curveball questions, which is why reading and filing from specific sources in addition to your standard periodicals, theory books, and think tanks is crucial. Specialized sources that my teammates and I found helpful at NCFLs included the Chronicle for Higher Education (for everyone’s favorite, the education round), the American Bar Association and SCOTUS Blog (musts for the Legal/Constitutional Round), the Congressional Budget Office website (great for economic statistics), and foreign newspapers (for a domestic perspective for international topics). Having a copy of the actual Constitution on hand also helped me out for the legal round.
Moving on to delivery techniques that will help you succeed at CFLs, the first crucial point is to appear likeable, relatable, and relaxed. Before each round, remind yourself how fortunate you are to be competing at a tournament of such high caliber–this will make you look like you want to be speaking. Let your voice convey how passionate you are for the issues about which you speak, and your conviction will inject your words with even more credibility. No matter how trivial your question seems, if you look like you care, odds are, the judge will start to as well. Speaking slowly and with conviction and choosing each word purposefully will, in turn, improve your fluidity–a component of extemp whose importance at NCFLs cannot be overstressed. Another problem extempers tend to develop is forgetting that facial gestures are just as important as hand gestures. Don’t be afraid to smile and look like you actually want to be competing. You could have the best analysis in the world, but a CFL judge may give you a poor rank if you’re emotionless and cold. My best ballots often complimented how eager I seemed to spread my knowledge about current events, and how conversational my speaking style was. Prior to CFLs, a judge told me that I came off as an unhappy newscaster rushing through the evening news. I took CFLs as an opportunity to make my delivery to sound less like an essay reading and more like a conversation. Tell the judge explicitly why they should care about your topic and why this specific question is being asked, right off the bat in your introduction. Find some way to bring the issue home to them, even if it occurs in a foreign country, and this will bolster your speech’s pathos without being overly emotional. Other delivery strategies are to, as always, incorporate a good balance of seriousness and humor; an AGD isn’t the only place you are allowed to be funny. Vehicles (i.e. when one introduces a theme in her introduction and weaves it into each one of her points) are also something I used in several outrounds that CFL judges loved. An overall strategy to balance logical analyses with good delivery that I used throughout the season and before NCFLs is using your teammates as resources: give practice speeches for your debater friends, who will tell you whether your points make sense, and also to orators and interpers, who give great critiques on fluidity and gestures. Practicing in front of a diverse audience is great practice for the CFL judge pool, which is home to drastically varying degrees of extemp experience. Since the judges’ backgrounds at this tournament are so varied, don’t feel like you have to stick to conventional, “cookie-cutter” style extemp to do well. Anything of substance that makes your speech stick out in the judges’ minds will ultimately set you apart from the rest of the competition.
If I had to give one piece of advice to extemp competitors at NCFLs, it would be the mantra of one of my extemp mentors, Zak Klein: “Stay calm, remember the basics, and above all, answer the damn question.” Out of all postseason national tournaments, NCFL Nationals is the ideal opportunity to show your passion for forensics, genuinely have fun with your speeches, and to add your personal flair to each speech. NCFLs is the time to change the minds of your outrounds judges who think that extemp is the most boring speech category, and prove that extempers can actually have fun. Hopefully, my experience helped you learn a bit about how to succeed at NCFLs, and I wish the best of luck to everyone competing!