Extemp question writing is often the red headed stepchild of forensic tournaments; it gets shoved off to someone else at the last moment, and before you know it someone’s writing out Round 2 on a restaurant napkin. That’s a real shame, because questions can make or break an extemp tournament. Good questions allow students to shine and make their skills and preparation, or lack thereof, crystal clear for any judge.Bad questions just muddy the waters; a student can be tripped up by bad grammar, poor formatting, one-sidedness or other pitfalls. That frustrates them; students who do poorly with badly written questions feel they had no shot. Students who do well don’t feel much better, since they are aware their victories came with luck as well as skill. Ultimately the questions are the only curriculum extemp has, and they deserve more than casual or uninformed treatment.
It’s a lot to ask a non-extemp coach to know both what’s going on in the world, and how to properly format a question to elicit good speeches. It’s nice to say that such coaches should find extemp coaches to do it for them, but that’s not always an option. And I’m all for openness in this activity, and am hostile to cliques and guilds.
Further, I do believe the difference between a good extemp question and a bad one isn’t necessarily in the topic chosen; sometimes the differences are simple matters of style and form which intelligent people who do not coach Extemp would have no way of knowing. Many a tournament’s bad questions have good questions at their heart, just bursting to come out. So, to attempt to prove it, here’s my “Idiot’s Guide to Writing Good Extemp Questions.”
The Basics
1. Keep it short. This is such a no-brainer and relatively easy to do, but many tournaments fail to do it. Each student must memorize the topic and repeat it verbatim for the judges. You can make this unnecessarily difficult, stealing prep time away from thinking, by writing questions that run for four lines.
Almost every valid extemp question can be expressed in language that fits in one line or one and a half lines. If you find yourself not able to reduce a question to less than one and a half lines of text, consider that the question itself may be too complicated, or contain unnecessary editorial comments.
Come to think of it, one of the simplest ways to avoid most of the pitfalls I outline below is to make the question as short as possible without losing any of the meaning.
2. Make sure it’s current. This sounds like a no brainer but things do slip through; don’t ask if Tony Blair will withdraw British troops from Iraq when Gordon Brown just became Prime Minister.
A good way to guard for this is to make sure you write about 3-4 more questions than you think you will need; that way, the prep room folks, who usually know a bit more about extemp, can look through them the morning of the tournament and remove obsolete questions. It’s also not a bad idea to allow a student drawing an obviously obsolete question to toss it and draw another.
3. Make sure it’s grammatical. This seems simple, yet sometimes people are willing to do all kinds of horrible things to the English language in an extemp question. Don’t do that; it hurts the students’ ability to remember the question, and might impair their ability to understand it.
4. Phrase it as a question. This also seems simple but sometimes when people hear “Extemp topic” they think they can make a statement and ask the students to comment on it. The form of extemp requires questions that can be answered, not statements to be considered.
5. Don’t explain the question. Sometimes novice question writers will feel the need to explain what they mean by the question or provide background material. This can sometimes be as little as a pejorative or explanatory adjective. However, if the topic can’t be expressed clearly in a question, then explanation and background material will not save it.
6. Avoid questions that are overly specific or nit-picky. Overly specific questions that require deep knowledge are begging for students to miss answering the question altogether. You can tell your questions are too specific if most of your judges are complaining that the students aren’t answering the questions; if one student fails a test, it’s the student; if they all fail, it’s the test.
I firmly believe students should be given the opportunity to succeed and give their best speeches; cranking up the difficulty in arbitrary ways usually does not help separate the best students out from the rest. It doesn’t even separate out the people with ridiculously large tubs from the rest. It only frustrates their ability to apply good analysis, and use good sources.
Specific questions also confuse your judges. Extemp judging is hard; judges must evaluate speaking style and analysis at the same time. If the question asks about issues that a reasonably educated adult judge has never heard of, chances are that judge will not be able to fairly evaluate the student’s analysis. For example, a question about a major Presidential candidate’s chances is fair, since most judges know enough about the issue to detect fraudulent or shallow analysis; however, if the question is a highly specific one about campaign staffers in Iowa and your tournament is in California, most judges will have no idea if the student is answering the question brilliantly or not — or even if they’re being truthful.
That’s one of the reasons I dislike the practice of hiring some college student to write your tournament’s questions. College students often want to show off how much they’ve learned and ask overly difficult questions. Even if they don’t, college students won’t understand as well as you do what your judges are comfortable with judging. Keep it local and personal, and you’ll do better, and save money to boot.
7. Avoid writing “special” questions for big rounds. Some people think it’s a good idea to have the final round questions be super-tough, or weird, or “fun” somehow. “Fun” questions are almost never fun, so be careful about this unless you really know what you’re doing; and in this arena a healthy sense of self doubt in “really knowing what you’re doing” is important.
It’s not a great idea to change the event just because it’s a final. Interp and debate events do change rules simply because it’s a big round. Extemp should not be treated differently. Let the best students at your tournament show what got them there.
8. Avoid answering the question for the student, or biasing it. Remove any moral judgments inherent in the question, and allow it to be answered, and answered honorably, both ways. For instance, this question came up at a tournament:
Should the UN intervene in Darfur to save thousands of innocent lives?
This would have been a perfectly good question without the “to save thousands of innocent lives.” You could answer “yes” and talk about innocent life saving, or you could answer “no” and say it wouldn’t do any good, or make the situation worse. But no student is going to stand up there and say “No, we should let thousands of innocent people die.” The extra moral judgment eliminated room for students to choose their answer to this question.
So make sure when you ask a question you could answer it two or more ways, and do so without sounding like Atilla the Hun.
9. Make sure the question does have an answer. Most extempers will be taught to repeat the question and give a short answer to it in their intros; a clear, memorable answer makes the rest of the speech flow better. So, avoid making the students give wishy washy or vague answers. Ask Is Iran a threat to the US?, which has a clear yes or no, not To what extent does Iran threaten the US?. The latter assumes there is a threat, and so eliminates a potential answer. It’s also impossible to answer in clear precise language. There’s no unit of measurement for threat; a student cannot hold their hands spaced in front of them and say “This much!”
So ask: Is trade with China having a negative affect on the US economy? Don’t ask How much is trade with China harming the US economy?
Harder stuff
Topic areas
Guidance on the question of topic areas is relatively minimal in extemp, and so sometimes novice question writers will come up with weird ones. Try to be as mainstream to current politics as you can until you get a sense of the event. Typical topic areas in Domestic are based around common issue areas:
- Health and Welfare
- Education
- US Economy
- Foreign Policy
- US Politics
Foreign topics can do that as well, such as:
- World Trade
- Global Poverty
- War on Terror
- International Organizations
They can also focus on continents or regions:
- Asia
- Europe
- The Americas
- The Mideast
- Sub-Saharan Africa
- Russia & Neighbors
Please, for the love of your students and judges, choose topic areas that will allow you to ask questions about current events without either getting so specific that no one has any idea what you’re talking about, or so vague as to be meaningless. If you find yourself writing questions about the Argentinian mining industry or Boise’s school budget struggles, that’s probably a sign. Open ended vague questions, such as “How’s the world economy doing?” is also begging for trouble.
Hot button topics
Avoid asking questions about certain sensitive cultural issues, such as abortion, gay rights, and religion. Students have a difficult time analyzing these questions, as most people believe what they believe based on faith, rather than analytic processes.
If your faith or intuition tells you that a fetus is alive from conception, it is very difficult to accept abortion; if your faith says it is not, and that women’s bodies are sacrosanct to them, then you equally cannot accept an abortion ban. There are people in between, but the issue is not comfortable for a lot of them either. The fundamental question is not a logical one, but the result of a faith decision that none of us can back up logically. These questions are unknown and to some extent unknowable.
Gay marriage is similar; some people accept homosexuality as identity; others think it’s a disorder; neither knows for sure. Their beliefs on gay rights flow from that initial judgment, which cannot itself be argued with in a 7 minute speech.
That’s why these issues are so contentious in society at wide. The different stances are the consequences of assumptions, and without shared assumptions there’s little ground for logical argumentation.
Religious issues are also by definition tagged to faith. Asking students about the particulars of an individual religion, even the politics surrounding that religion, is bias. Their answer does not depend on their extemp skill: A Catholic student might know a great deal about the Pope’s stances on contraception; a typical Jewish student would likely know far less.
The end result of all this hoopla is that extempers avoid these questions like Bubonic plague. It’s a common saying among extempers that “Oh I’d only speak on that if the other two questions were abortion and gay marriage” to demonstrate how bad a question is. There’s simply too much risk a judge will not listen to anything they say on the matter if they get it wrong, and the students cannot guess which is the ‘right’ answer.
So avoid touching these topics altogether if you can. If you must, talk about their political and social effects; things which can be fairly analyzed, though not without danger. Simply asking a student if gay marriage should be allowed is playing with fire. It is potentially fair to ask a student if a gay marriage amendment could pass the US Congress; there they are analyzing political trends and stances, not the actual moral issue itself. However, while those can be valuable questions, exercise caution in asking them; students will often feel they are going into a round already having lost some judges if they have to speak on these hot button issues. And often they’ll be right. Best stay away.
Pop Culture Topics
I can’t say this strongly enough: do not include questions on pop culture: movies, music, celebrities or sports. Paris Hilton does not belong in extemp!
The vast majority of students despise these rounds, and for good reason. They stand far outside of the expected curriculum of extempers. Extemp teaches students how to analyze the world in certain ways; political affairs and economies and diplomacy follow certain patterns the students are encouraged to learn. If they do, students can draw accurate conclusions about unfamiliar countries or areas of domestic policy given a small set of facts. That’s one of the prime skills Extemp aims to teach.
They cannot use those same tools to analyze whether some celebrity marriage is going to end horribly, or whether one consumer electronics product is better than another; instead they are either forced to rely on some completely lame and generic connection to an issue that sounds like it matters (”Americans are too concerned with celebrities!”) or just repeat hearsay from some trash mag. That vastly increases the amount of material that a student has to be responsible for; typical filing does not include People magazine.
Lastly, extemp students do not care about these topics. Let’s be clear. Extempers are geeks. That’s why I like them. If they liked the tabloids and pop culture, they wouldn’t be doing extemp; these kids actually prefer to talk about budget deficits and international crises. I think most people include pop culture rounds in extemp because they believe that it will be “fun”. If you think this, please go to a prep room and take a straw poll.
If even that doesn’t stop you, please do avoid sports questions or high tech. Sports topics are biased against girls. Specific questions about high tech areas also are biased towards the few students who have that hobby; it is not knowledge general to extemp, and unfair to the students at large.
Ultimately, extempers cannot be responsible for everything in the newspaper. It’s simply too much. If we’ve taught our students broad knowledge of government, economics, and other serious news we’ve done a good job. Complicating it with the back sections of the papers only undermines that lesson. Leave it out.
Tensions
An extemp question should ask after what I like to call a single tension. There should be one (and only one) fundamental conflict or weight at the heart of the question between two values, options, problems or some other focus of extemp questions. For instance:What should the Bush administration do about the political situation in Iraq?
Is a good question, since it specifically addresses the Bush administration’s response to the Iraqi government. However:
What can Bush do to solve Iraq’s problems while satisfying Congress and the public?
It’s still a short question, but there’s a lot going on here. It’s asking about Bush’s policy in Iraq, Bush’s relations with Congress, his political skills with the US populace, and a little diplomacy thrown in. You could write a doctoral dissertation about any of those areas; trying to answer all three in a seven minute speech is asking too much.
Pairs have tensions too
This advice, however doesn’t necessarily mean you can only ask about one thing in your questions; many good questions will ask students to weigh two policy goals or foreign alliances against each other. For example:
Is Iran a threat to world peace?
Is a good monopole question that has a clear purpose. However, you could also ask:
Is Iran or North Korea the larger threat to world peace?
This asks students to weigh the threat posed by the two countries’ governments, which is still a single tension. However, it helps a great deal to make sure the tensions relate to each other in a true tradeoff. This is more common on the domestic side of extemp. For example:
Should the US focus more crime prevention, or instead move towards longer prison sentences?
This is a clear tradeoff; each approach has its merits and its doubters, and there’s only so much money to go around. You can weigh these two approaches to fighting crime against each other pretty well. But, this is a bad question:
Should US cities focus more on crime prevention or low income housing?
I’m sure you could find a link somewhere between low income housing and crime. But would you really want to torture a student to do so? Kids who draw this question, no matter how good they are, are not going to give good speeches.
The Infamous Triads
You can also write questions that ask how relations between two parties affect a third; there is still only a single tension in many of these cases. For instance:
Should Gordon Brown lead Britain towards the EU and away from the US?
Is a fair question because the tension here is directly between the EU and the US, as they relate to Britain’s politics. There are three players here, actually, but there’s only one tension, and that’s between the EU and the US. Extempers should be able to answer this question.
Be sure, however, when constructing these that the three parties actually do relate to one another. I doubt US trade with Bolivia affects the Indonesian economy much; so don’t ask about all three in the same question. If there’s no compelling reason for the three parties to be involved in one question, then avoid triad questions.
Dumbing Down
It will perhaps be asserted that this approach to question writing will dumb down extemp. Nothing could be further than the case. Clear, direct questions can be asked about very tough issues and problems in the world. It is by no means a simple thing to answer “Will Clinton win the Democratic nomination?” or “How can developing countries address the AIDS crisis?”. Questions like these simply best allow good extempers to shine, and make it easier for judges to rank rounds; usually the level of analysis displayed in rounds with questions like these is far better than when the questions address pop culture topics or overly specific issues.
Conclusions in brief
So that’s about that. Following these guidelines may not guarantee good topic areas, but they do address the most common things that I hear extempers (justifiably) complaining about after tournaments.
As a final word of advice, you can find other tournament’s questions on the web often times. Look for some good examples, though if you’re unsure, ask some students if they’re good examples or not.
And finally, I would suggest making this a process, not a task. Post your own questions publicly, and invite comments on them to see how you can improve. Talk to students and judges about which questions elicited good speeches and why. I think most of the trouble of bad topics is that people bitch about them amongst themselves, and never share their issues with people who can do something about it. So that’s why I wrote this, in the interests of making tournaments better, both for extemp question writers who sit down and aren’t entirely sure what to do, and for the students themselves.
