The task of writing extemp questions is often neglected; it’ll get forgotten, shoved off until the last minute, and before you know it someone’s writing out Round 2 on a restaurant napkin. That’s a real shame, because questions are critical to the quality of an extemp tournament. Good questions allow students to make their skills and preparation — or lack thereof — crystal clear for any judge. Bad questions muddy the waters; a good speaker can easily be tripped up by bad questions, and come away with a bad taste in the mouth. Students who do poorly with badly written questions feel, often accurately, that they had no shot. Students who do well in such tournaments don’t feel much better; they are usually aware their victories came by the luck of the draw, not speaking skill. Ultimately the questions are the only curriculum extemp has, and they deserve more than casual effort.
It’s all fine and good to say that tournament directors should find extemp coaches to write questions for them, and for larger, regional and national tournaments, I’d fault any tournament director who didn’t do precisely that. However, for locals, that’s not always an option. Plus, if tournaments everywhere left question writing solely to those already in the midst of extemp, that threatens to close off extemp to outside influences, and discourages programs from starting up extemp speaking within their programs. One of the major reasons extemp has largely resisted the forces that make debate events anti-rhetorical and solely content-based is that extemp is more exposed to outside forces; given that it lives with IEs, it gets judged by IE judges, and so it has more awareness and sensitivity to a lay audience. That aspect of extemp is important, and by closing it off into a “professional” sphere on its own, tournament directors would risk turning it into another high-speed, low-speaking-quality debate event.
Further, I do believe the difference between a good extemp question and a bad one isn’t necessarily in the topic chosen. The difference between a good question and a bad one are usually matters of style and form; technicalities which people who do not coach extemp would have no way of knowing. Many bad questions have good questions at their heart. Therefore, some technical advice for the prospective question writer is in order.
The Basics
1. Keep it short. This guideline is such a no-brainer, but many tournaments fail at it. Extemp students must memorize their questions and repeat them verbatim in their speeches, without notes. You the question writer can make this unnecessarily difficult by writing questions that run for four lines or more. That steals away the student’s prep time from actually thinking about and praciticing their answer.
Furthermore, consider that almost every valid extemp question can be expressed in language that fits in one or at most 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 far too complicated, or contain unnecessary editorial comments. One of the simplest ways to avoid most of the pitfalls I outline below is to make the question as short as possible; remove any interpretation, background information, or side-issues from the question text.
2. Make sure it’s current. It seems obvious to check your questions’ currency, but things do slip through; don’t ask if Tony Blair will withdraw British troops from Iraq when Gordon Brown just became Prime Minister. Also, I know you’ll have a lot to do in the last days before your tournament, but the later you write your extemp questions, the better you’ll be able to sidestep this issue; if you write questions a week or two ahead of time, you’re guaranteed to have an outdated question in the mix.
A good way to guard for this is to make sure you write about 3-4 more questions than you think you will need for each round; that way, the prep room folks can look through them the morning of the tournament and remove obsolete questions. It’s also not a bad idea to specifically allow a student drawing an obviously obsolete question to discard it and draw another.
3. Make sure all questions follow proper grammar. I know, again, seems obvious, but I wouldn’t say it if people didn’t do it. People are willing to do all kinds of horrible things to the English language in an extemp question. Bad grammar hurts the students’ ability to remember the question, and might impair their ability to understand it.
4. Phrase it as a question that can have an explicit answer. Sometimes, when people hear “Extemp topic”, they write out statements of opinion, not questions, and expect the students to comment on that statement. However you really should phrase each one in the form of a specific question. It’s what the students expect, and many students actually build their speeches’ structure around a question-answer format, and will be thrown for a loop if they’re given a simple statement.
5. Don’t explain your question, or justify it. Sometimes novice question writers will feel the need to explain what they mean by the question in the question, or provide background material. However, if the topic can’t be expressed clearly in a short question, then explanation and background material will not save it. If a question has two potential ways of answering it, so be it; let the students choose which way to answer it, and don’t try to force them into one path.
6. Avoid questions that are overly specific or nit-picky. Overly specific questions that require deep knowledge will just result in students missing 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 all students fail, it’s the test.
I firmly believe students should be given the opportunity to succeed and give their best speeches in every round. If you have several arbitrarily tough and specific questions mixed into your pool, then good students will fail to get that opportunity if they get unlucky in the draw. They will leave your tournament feeling they did not have a chance to show what they could do, because they had no idea whether the health minister of Peru should allocate more money to a hospital in the southern Lima suburbs. Often times they will not return to your tournament as a result.
Remember, also, the burden you place on your extemp judges. Extemp judging is hard; judges must evaluate speaking style and critical analysis of world affairs, both at the same time. If your questions ask about issues that a reasonably knowledgeable adult judge has no familiarity with, chances are that judge will not be able to fairly evaluate the student’s analysis. A question about a major Presidential candidate’s chances is therefore fair game. A highly specific topic about campaign staffers in Iowa, when your tournament is in California, will mean most of your judges will have no idea if the student is answering the question brilliantly or not — or even if they’re being truthful.
As a side note, one of the reasons I dislike the practice of hiring a college student to write your tournament’s questions is that they tend to be overly-specific “gotcha” style questions. College students often want to show off how much they’ve learned, and have an inflated notion of what their own skills and abilities were like when they were in high school. I have coached extemp now for 13 years; the general skill level of extempers has not changed in that time, but college sophomores invariably talk about how “the event has really gone downhill since I was in high school.” Even if they are humble and understanding, however, college students won’t understand as well as you do what your judges are comfortable with judging. Keep the question writing to adults involved in high school forensics, and you’ll do much better.
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. Rounds where kids write their own questions based on arbitrary guidelines, or impersonate world leaders, or so on abound at tournaments, particularly large national ones, for reasons that forever will confound me.
“Fun” questions are almost never fun, so be careful about this unless you really know what you’re doing. And if you think you really know what you’re doing, reconsider; a healthy sense of self-doubt is important before you start messing with the format and rules of an event.
I tend to strongly believe an event’s rules should not change just because it’s a final round. A final should try to evaluate the skills of best extempers; it should not attempt to introduce a different skillset altogether at the last minute. Other events do not change rules in finals; 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 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 argue that intervention wouldn’t do any good, or might even make the situation worse. But with the question phrased as it is above, no student in their right mind is going to answer “no”, since doing so would be tantamount to saying “No, we should let thousands of innocent people die.” The extra moral judgment in the question therefore eliminated the students’ ability 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. Therefore, it’s helpful to avoid forcing the students give wishy washy or vague answers. Ask Is Iran a significant threat to US security?, which has a clear yes or no, not To what extent does Iran threaten US security?. First, the latter example’s language assumes a threat exists; a student arguing that no such threat exists is therefore starting at a disadvantage. Secondly, and more importantly, it’s impossible to answer the second phrasing in clear, precise language. There’s no unit of measurement for “threat levels”; 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, welfare and social policy
- Educational policy
- 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 being so vague as to be meaningless. If you find yourself writing questions about the Argentinian mining industry or Boise’s school budget struggles — unless you live in Idaho, of course — your topics were probably a little too specific. Open ended vague questions, such as “How’s the world economy doing?” is also begging for incoherent rambles; be a bit more specific than that.
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 behind abortion rights is not a logical one, but the result of a faith decision. The question of when life begins ties directly to the nature of what life is. The meaning of life is not the domain of science, reason, and logical argumentation.
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. The extra-rational nature of these issues is why they’re so contentious in society; one of the failures of American discourse is that we’ve tried to use rational political conversations to sway others on issues that resist it. Unlike economic policy, where everyone operates under the basic assumption that prosperity is a good thing, different stances on social issues are the consequences of different basic assumptions. 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, or even the politics surrounding that religion, is bias. Their ability to 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 philosophical introspection is that extempers avoid these questions like you avoid judging Declamation. A common saying among extempers is “Oh, I’d only speak on that if the other two questions were abortion and gay marriage.” They’re the classic “don’t touch” areas. Students know substantial numbers of judges will not listen to anything they say on these issues; if the judges and students differ on their opinions, good reasoning and analysis will not save the student from the judges’ wrath.
You should be aware of, and sensitive to, that problem as well. Avoid touching these topics altogether. If you must, talk about the issues’ political and social effects; concentrate on social results and outcomes which can be fairly analyzed. Simply asking a student if gay marriage should be allowed is playing with fire. It is possibly fair to ask a student if a gay marriage amendment could pass the US Congress; there they are analyzing votes and political trends, not the actual moral issue itself. However, while those are valuable questions, I’d avoid them all the same; students won’t want to pick them anyway, and a speaker who, by luck of the draw, is forced to speak on these issues will still walk into the round feeling that some of the judges are already lost, and will refuse to listen to the speech fairly. Often enough, the student will 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. Extemp teaches students how to analyze the world; political affairs and economies and diplomacy follow certain patterns the students are encouraged to learn. If they do understand these patterns and ideas, 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; a way of thinking about the world that will help them analyze new, unexpected developments.
Students cannot use those ideas to analyze whether some celebrity marriage is going to end horribly, or whether one consumer electronics product is better than another. When they draw questions like that, students are forced either to rely on some completely lame and generic connection to an issue that sounds like it matters (”Americans are too concerned with celebrities!”), or to repeat hearsay from some trash mag. If you think students should quote trash mags, then pop culture rounds would vastly increase 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 tabloids and pop culture, they wouldn’t be doing extemp, and that would be a shame. 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 technology. 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. I work in high tech, and I can tell you, students never answer these questions well; typically they require years of extensive technical knowedge that students — and judges — do not have.
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 serious news we’ve done a good job. Complicating it with the back sections of the paper only undermines that goal. 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. Also, be sure you’re dealing with a single main tension. If you ask about the relations between Britain, France, and Germany, you’re forcing the student to address all three “poles” of the tension, not just one. That kind of speech would be considered too broad for most political science doctoral dissertations; it’s definitely too ambitious for a seven minute extemp speech.
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 the US Economy grow in the next year?” or “How can developing countries address the AIDS crisis?” If you could answer those questions clearly and exactly, you’d win the Nobel prize. Questions like these 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.
