The Atlanta Urban Debate League is committed to providing excellent debate education programs, services, and opportunities to diverse students, educators, and members of the community!
Practicing Your Speech
In order to give a perfect delivery of a speech, you have to PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE. Read each word and sentence aloud will greatly improve the delivery precision and flow.
Phases of practicing
Phase 1: Familiarizing yourself with your speech. Familiarize yourself with your speech – what’s each paragraph’s topic sentence? What direct quotations should you memorize? What is the author and date for those articles? Familiarizing your speech is key to having control over your speech itself and your speech behavior.
Familiarizing your speech usually comes in the form of reading your speech over and over again until you can understand the main points and the flow of your speech.
Controlling your speech. Once you’re familiar with the main claims and evidence in your speech, you should also be capable of modifying the speech and pacing the speech’s timing during the speech to maximize the audience’s reaction.
Controlling your speech behavior. Being confident and establishing good eye contact with the judges.
Phase 2: Modifying your speech. As you read each sentence OUT LOUD, you will realize whether a sentence sounds good or not. If it doesn’t sound good, take the time to mark your speech with fixes – modifications include changing words, adding commas for oral pauses, revising sentence order, and more.
Time markings. One thing to mark your speech with during practice are time markings. What is the time when you reach the first point? The second point? Do you finish on time? Mark your expected speech times on your speech so you know your pacing!
Phase 3: Impromptu. By now, you’ll realize that a lot of your speech, or at least the main ideas, are fully memorized. Impromptu means being able to understand the main points and the important words you should say and being able to put them into different words.