The Econ Problem
If you’ve ever been in a large prep room when tab staff announced that econ would be the next round’s topic area, you know that reactions tend to be mixed. Some extempers leap from their seats and applaud right away. They were born for this. The Fed is their Roman Empire and there is nothing anyone can do to undermine the sheer amount of excitement they have for the topic area and the knowledge they’ll be able to share. At the same time, an often larger group begins to moan and groan. Econ? Again? It feels like we just had an econ round.
Dreading an econ round is normal. Unlike issues like healthcare or conflict or politics, economics can feel, well, dry. It’s hard to stay interested while prepping and even harder to give a speech that audiences and judges find interesting.
A mark of a masterful extemper though is that they can make any topic area (yes, even econ) interesting by staying personable in round. The more detached we get from our speeches, the more rote they feel when we’re faced with a dryer seeming question.
So, today, in typical extemp fashion, we’ll review 3 strategies for keeping all of your speeches personable. After all, you can give the tightest content speech in the world but if nobody remembers it, it could end up being more of a liability than an asset.
Narratives
Narratives have been growing increasingly popular among national circuit extempers the past few years and for good reason. They’re an effective tool for humanizing speech topics and drawing in an audience.
Extempers will open their speech with an AGD about a particular person impacted by the issue at hand and weave their story through the speech, using their narrative to add urgency and meaning to their content.
So, for example, if you were to draw a question about whether the Fed should hold interest rates you could open with a narrative about an American struggling to make ends meet and explain how they specifically may be impacted by proposed changes throughout your speech.
While narratives can be highly impactful and can level up even a content-light speech, there are some things to be cautious of when employing them. First, it’s important that the tone of the narrative matches the remainder of the speech. If you use a heart-wrenching narrative but then are quipping about bond yields within your points without integrating the narrative and its emotional pull something is going to feel off.
Second, authenticity is key when it comes to narratives. If it’s obvious to judges that you’ve taken a random name from a BBC article without much care for the person you’re speaking about or their fate, use of a narrative may come off as more exploitative than effective. Practice conveying raw but not overwrought emotion in speeches to perfect the delivery of intense narratives.
Humor and Style
Sometimes what sets an extemper apart isn’t something specific about their content or delivery but just how authentically themself they are in round. If you draw a boring question that doesn’t necessarily have emotional weight to it, now may be the time to let your style shine.
For some extempers, this means just leaning into humor, especially sarcasm. After all, it’s a lot harder to forget a person than it is to forget the details of their argument about crypto. Not only does leaning into humor–if that’s your thing–often make a speech more personable, it can serve to further your points too. When dealing with dense material like economic policy, an exaggerated humorous analogy whether within a point or in an AGD can serve to both intrigue judges and demystify your subject matter.
Similarly, taking the classic route of joking about the leaders behind your topic can salvage an otherwise dry speech. People like to laugh. An enjoyable and boring speech is better than just a boring speech. To learn more about how to get those laughs, check out this article about fine tuning your humor.
As with narratives though, you run the risk of your jokes coming off as stilted or inauthentic. While joke delivery is something that any extemper can polish in practice, it’s important to remember that humor isn’t mandatory. If you don’t generally find yourself gravitating towards comedy–in or out of extemp–it just may not be your thing and that’s okay! Any speech can be levelled up by adding your personal flair. For some speakers that’s poetic rhetoric or blunt confrontation. Whatever is your thing, lean into that. A personality is almost always better than the blank slate of “an extemper.”
Oftentimes, personal style ceases to come through when speakers get trapped in a pattern of “speech voice” (the same rhythm over and over) or use certain words (imperative, critical, etc) as a crutch. Recording your practice speeches and noticing when you do this most, so you can practice breaking out of it and returning to something more genuine, is a great way to prepare to let your personality shine.
Impacting
So far, we’ve discussed strategies for adding some flare to otherwise boring speeches mainly outside of the body of your points. Crucially, however, an otherwise dry speech about econ or something similar can be made relevant within each point by doing in depth impacting your C subpoints.
For questions asking whether an actor should do something or what the effects of an action will be this is relatively self explanatory: you discuss the potential ramifications of a policy or decision. Doing so helps ground your speech in the real world, giving judges something to latch onto and thus making it more personable.
Obviously though, this is more difficult for questions that feel isolated from broader societal issues. For example, a question like “what’s driving the current sell off in the bond market?” could pose some problems as the stakes of the question don’t immediately seem high; it’s not instructive, it’s informative.
In such cases, stepaways can be a valuable tool. A stepaway, typically one to two sentences, is when a speaker offers impact analysis that isn’t directly addressing the question at hand. So, in the case of the question about the bond market, if I had a point about how tariffs were undermining investor confidence, I could say something at the end of my point about how in addition to driving a bond sell off, high tariffs threaten to catastrophically raise prices for everyday Americans. It’s not directly related to the question but adds useful context to the issues being discussed to give them added importance. Of course, it’s important to be sparing with both the volume and length of your stepaways so as to avoid distracting from the content of your speech but when used effectively, they can add important texture to a speech.
Parting Thoughts
While there’s nothing wrong with a solid but boring speech, an exciting one, especially in an otherwise uneventful round, can do wonders in setting you apart. By focusing on narrative, style/humor, and impacting, even an econ speech can be electrifying.