By Rick Vacek | May 9, 2024
There are many different events University of Texas at Dallas students can enter when they join Comet Speech and Forensics, but there is only one way to learn how to excel at speaking in front of an audience.
Practice.
“We coach it like anything else – through practice,” said Dr. John Gooch, who directs the team with the help of Kathy Lingo, a colleague in the Harry W. Bass Jr. School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology.
These sessions are nothing like a sports workout, however. Rather than taking direction solely from the coaching staff as they alternate practicing their speeches, team members join the coaches in offering their feedback.
“I get everyone involved,” said Gooch, the Bass School’s area head for communication studies and associate professor of rhetoric and communication studies.
Gooch also provides written feedback, and students can have individual practices with him. But the team gatherings contain the most benefits thanks to the let’s-help-each-other tone.
“A lot of it has to do with Dr. Gooch,” junior Pranav Kumar said. “If there ever are any issues, they get resolved very fast and in a very effective way.”
But before attending a practice, a prospective team member usually has to resolve whether to memorize a speech for the platform events or learn how to think quickly and react in the limited preparation (LP) events.
There also are oral interpretation events, but platform and LP were the categories most frequently entered by the UT Dallas contingent in its recent trips to national and international tournaments.
Here’s a look at each category, with comments from Gooch and team members:
The preparation is as important as the delivery in this category.
“You have to come prepared with your analysis and research in a 10-minute digestible format for an audience that may or may not be experts and persuade them about why this is a prominent issue right now,” senior Alex de Jesus-Colon said. “You have to do it in a way that people will respect it and understand it and see how it weighs against other topics.
“There are a lot of topics going on right now that people feel a need to inform or persuade about.”
Persuasive speaking presents solutions. Gooch loves it because it “very much reminds me of the Greeks and Romans. There’s an argument and they have these areas with a call to action at the end, like someone on the floor of Congress or the Parliament.”
Informative speeches are designed to raise awareness. Junior Sneha Elangovan wrote hers, about health care, in September and then kept changing it based on judges’ remarks. Memorization isn’t a problem for her (“Sometimes I mess up more when I have the script in front of me,” she said), but part of the refinement is learning how to connect with the audience.
“I’m very big on eye contact when I talk to people,” Elangovan said. “When I break the eye contact, I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh. Where was I?’, and then it takes me a little bit to recover. But once it’s in my memory, it’s almost like muscle memory.”
The other platform events are after-dinner, which Gooch likens to “standup comedy with sources,” and communications analysis, defined by the American Forensic Association as “an explanation and/or evaluation of a communication event such as a speech, speaker, movement, poem, poster, film, campaign, etc., through the use of rhetorical principles.”
These are very different events with very similar challenges.
In extemporaneous, a random draw gives competitors a hot topic in politics or society. They have 30 minutes to research and then present it in a seven-minute talk.
“You have to deal with questions that make people uncomfortable – things they don’t want to talk about,” said de Jesus-Colon, citing this example: Do you believe the TikTok ban is justified?
“I view extemp to be the most challenging and rewarding. It forces you to think about topics you don’t like thinking about in your day-to-day life. Or you might have to explain it in a way the average person can understand.”
Said Gooch, “When I think of public speaking, I think of extemporaneous speaking. I always have.”
Impromptu creates even more pressure to think fast. The student is handed a quotation – sometimes themed, usually from someone famous in history – and has a total of seven minutes to think of what to say and then say it.
Three examples from a recent event:
Students have seven minutes to prepare and deliver the speech, which means that the faster they prepare, the more time they have to speak. The most successful contestants usually need only 30 seconds to think of the right words.
“With prepared speeches, you have an idea of how well you’re going to do. With impromptu, it truly is a wild card at a tournament, but I think that’s what makes it so fun,” said senior Arlin Khan, who uses her studies as a history and neuroscience major to think of past examples. “When we get back the placements of who made it to finals, it truly is a surprise every time.”
Equally surprising is the feeling when the short-but-stressful talk is over, she added: “Once you’re up there, words come out. Most people feel like they have no idea what they just said.”
Even though he’s the coach, Gooch marvels at how his students react to these speech challenges.
“They’re smarter than I ever thought about being, that’s for sure,” he said. “I often half-jokingly say to people, ‘I wonder what I could have done if I were as smart as these people.’”
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Read more: It was far and away a great year for Comet Speech and Forensics