By now, the fabulous writers at the Extemper’s Bible have probably taught you all there is to know about the rules of extemp. You know what substructure belongs in what kind of speech, when to use humor, and how to keep a judge engaged. But no formula is ever 100% perfect, and formulaic speeches don’t always win rounds. Often, the best part of knowing the rules is knowing how to break them.
How do you know you can break the rules?
Extempers should always start with the basics. Don’t mess with substructure until you can accurately name what the “norm” should be. For example, if you’re answering the question “What action can private companies take to decrease political polarization?” and you want to spend a point debunking claims made in favor of the 24 hour news cycle, you should first recognize that you’re “supposed” to use problem solution substructure. Otherwise, you run the risk of not being able to articulate just why you need to break the rules in the first place.
When should you break the rules?
The most simple answer is: when the speech would make less sense to the judge if it stuck to the rules than if it broke them. Let’s break that down a little more.
When the substructure mold doesn’t fit
Extemper’s love to preach the gospel of parallel substructure. This is basically the idea that all of your points should use the same substructure; if your first point is expectation/violation, all of your points should be. But sometimes, not every point can fit into the same structure. For example, the question “Has New Orleans fully recovered 25 years after Katrina?” can be answered No, with the points of political corruption, gentrification, and economic stagnation. However, economic stagnation is the result of a plan with a goal that failed. Those key words reek of expectation/violation. But gentrification and political corruption are just continuities of the status quo. While you could shoehorn them into a goal that came up short, the judge will have a much easier time understanding “New Orleans was corrupt, but no one did anything about it, so New Orleans is still corrupt.”
When the tone is awkward
This article’s author is a big fan of the belief that extempers are just political theater kids; we like to be entertaining. Because of this, and because we don’t want the judge to fall asleep, it’s become a norm to put humor or an emotional narrative in the AGDs and ontops, and impassioned pleas in the impacts. But not every speech lends itself to this kind of tonal variety. Extempers frequently lose rounds attempting to make jokes in between illuminating the famine in Gaza. Judges don’t want to hear about how China’s property market could cause World War III. Not every speech is built to oscillate between funny and serious; if you draw the question “Who will control postwar Gaza?”, your Jared Kushner real estate jokes DO NOT belong next to casualty counts.
When you have a really cool idea
Extemp is fundamentally a rhetorical event. Your goal is to make the judge understand the topic and feel something about it. If you have a nontraditional method of accomplishing that goal, use it. There are a few ground rules of extemp: don’t talk about yourself, don’t metareference your speech, don’t discuss the event as a whole. But often, the most powerful speeches are powerful because they break these norms. For example, take the speech “Is democracy dying in Peru?”. Maybe your last point is that it’s breaking down so insidiously no one notices. If you really wanted to, you could fake out the audience by pretending to skip over your third point right into the conclusion to see who was really paying attention, and then hit them with “this is exactly what Dina Boluarte is doing to Peru, breaking rules so carefully and quietly that no one can stop her.” It breaks every norm of extemp; it shatters the 4th wall, it calls out the event itself, and it challenges the audience. But it would certainly get their attention. Ultimately, the risk is up to you.