Far more than speaking skills tested at the State Speech Tournament for 18 Chesterton students competing Saturday in Fishers

Tom Keegan
Onwardtrojans.com

The things those in pursuit of a state championship in speech won’t do to improve their chances.
You never would suspect it now, but Madison Morton once needed work on her projection and was open to suggestions.
Following a tip from a speech coach, she used planking,
an isometric core exercise that involves maintaining a position somewhat like a push-up, except resting on forearms instead of hands, for as long as possible.
“You tighten up your core through planking and I never realized it affected my voice,” Morton said. “So, to practice my projection, I had to go in a practice room, and I would plank while talking. So now I just imagine I’m doing that plank when I talk.”
Morton is one of 18 Chesterton High School student who made it out of sectionals to qualify for this weekend’s state speech tournament at Fishers High School.
An interview with just four of the 18 competitors showed what a wide gamut of skills are tested at the tournament.
A senior, Morton will compete in Prose Interpretation and Programmed Oral Interpretation.
Junior Isabel Durkin (United States Extemporaneous, and Declamation) and seniors Patrick Hansen (Impromptu Speaking) and Carmen Thomas (Original Oratory and Broadcasting) also will spend Friday night in a hotel and try to keep qualifying for the next round, the next round, the next round throughout the day in hopes of joining five others in the final round.
The competition starts at 7:45 a.m. and wraps up for the finalists somewhere in the dinner hour. The longer the day, the better because a shorter day means elimination.
Hansen has not a clue what he will discuss until the Impromptu competition begins, he opens the envelope, and it reveals the topic of his talk. From that point, he will have seven minutes to prepare for and deliver a speech on that topic.
“Typically, what a lot of people do is two minutes prep, five minutes speaking,” said Hansen, who qualified for the debate national tournament in DesMoines in June. “I’ve been able to get it down to 30 seconds prep, 6:30 speaking.”
Hansen explained why he needs so little prep time: “There are a lot of different words, but a lot of them connect to the same general idea of motivation or passion, so being able to connect to that general idea siphons down the amount of prep time needed.”
At the sectional, Round 1 was a quote, “I forgot from whom,” Hansen said. “Then Rounds 2 and 3 was just one word. The first one was ‘leadership.’ Then the final round, it was a quote from Socrates.”
Six-and-a-half minutes is a lot of time to fill talking about something dropped on your plate 30 seconds ago, no?
“It’s a bit challenging, but fun,” Hansen said.
Morton’s challenges are of a much different sort: “My prose, it’s something I prepare at the beginning of the year. I do the exact same thing every weekend against the same exact pieces. I take a 10-minute excerpt of a book and this year my book is Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, by Roxane Gay. I kind of act out her story in a way to make my judges feel something or hear something I’m trying to say. This year, my piece for my prose, I talk about the idea of taking up space as a fat woman and how society looks down upon that.”
Speech students tend to use acronyms and interpretations when mentioning the categories. Programmed Oral Interpretation is “POI.” United States Extemporaneous is “extemp” or “U.S. extemp.” Declamation is “deck.”
“My POI, which is also 10 minutes, you construct very early on in the season, and it’s when you take different books, poetry and speeches, and you intertwine them into different characters and you create a plot to tell a specific issue, like almost a thesis statement we have. I started creating my POI my sophomore year,” Morton said. “Once you have an issue you want to discuss, you find so many pieces of material around that set issue and then you make it into different characters that have different plot diagrams and different stories. It’s so fun and interesting.”
Morton has taken advantage of the creative license her category allows to give life to fictional characters and present situations that can shock the listener into paying attention.
“I discuss purity culture and the idea of being raised in a religious environment that upholds this idea that saving yourself for marriage and being pure is the only way to go, and through that environment, we isolate sexual assault victims,” Morton said.
She then shared a quick look at a few characters that she created: “I have a preacher character, and I have a girl who experiences this, and then I have a little girl who is talking about how she is pure as a dove, and then I have another character who’s this slam poetry character.”
And: “I have one specific character who experiences sexual assault, and she realizes that she can’t tell anyone because she feels isolated from her community. As that character, I go on about how she feels as if no one believes this wasn’t her fault.”
And: “I have this one section of my preacher, she takes brownies, and she takes the knife and drags it through dog poop, and then she proceeds to cut the brownies, and she asks, ‘Do you want the brownie now?’ And no one wants it because it’s impure.”
In a sense, declamation is the category that adheres most purely to the idea of becoming a better speaker and excludes the writing portion of giving a speech. It entails giving someone else’s speech.
Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream and Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address are popular choices for competitions at various levels, but Durkin kept it closer to home and chose a piece written in 2019 by Anna Sanders, then a member of the Chesterton speech team, for an Original Oratory competition. It’s called Stuck in the Past.
“There are definitely aspects of learning how to be a better speaker,” Durkin said. “You can’t change what’s happening, you can’t change what they wrote or what they said. I think it’s truly about performing it to the best of your ability.”
Durkin’s other category, United States Contemporaneous, requires more levels of organization, preparation, knowledge and requires students to deal with pressure and work efficiently on the fly.
“You’re given a question about America today, whether it’s foreign policy, healthcare, education, it could be anything really,” Durkin said. “So, we’ve talked about everything from immigration policy to the bird flu, and essentially you have 30 minutes to prepare a speech with multiple-cited sources and a thesis, an introduction, a conclusion, all of those parts, and it goes into a seven-minute speech that you deliver without any notes to a judge or multiple judges.”
Can you say intimidating?
“Freshman year I did extemp and it was very scary at the time,” Durkin said. “I am not as intimidated. Now it’s kind of like you go in, you find some articles, you go give the speech. I’m much more relaxed than I have been in the past. In that aspect, I feel a lot more comfortable giving speeches and being more knowledgeable about our modern-day issues, and what’s actually happening around me. I’m more comfortable giving those speeches both to a judge and to a family or in a public environment.”
Thomas described the original oratory category as “exactly what you’d think of when you think of speech. It’s essentially a 10-minute Ted Talk.”
The 24 competitors who survive the three preliminary rounds advance to the quarterfinal round, 12 make the semifinal cut, and the top six are in the final.
“It’s a really long day of competing that takes a lot of energy and stamina,” Thomas said.
She described the broadcasting competition as “an event where I pretend to be a radio host. We’re just judged off our voice, and the event includes news programs, editorials, and cold reads.”
Thomas made the top 12 in Informative Speaking last year and she and her partner, Addie Botts, placed fifth in Duo Interpretation.
One word: speech, involves so much more than speaking for the 18 Chesterton students competing against students from throughout Indiana in Fishers this Saturday.