Extemporaneous Speaking Competitions: Investigating the Impact of Conventional Extemporaneous Speech Organization and Judge Experience on Speaker Ratings.

Extemporaneous speaking has long been a cornerstone event in competitive forensic. According to public speaking scholars, organization is of paramount importance in determining the success of a speech. This experimental study examines judges (N=66) responses to two extemporaneous speeches. The results indicated that experienced judges who viewed the speech without a numerated preview and review, which the forensic world considers the normative structure, rated the speech as being poorer than the group that had the normative structure present. Experienced judges also rated the two speeches as significantly different on the speech rating criteria of analysis when that factor was held constant. The findings also show that judges of high experience are more punitive in their scoring of the speech that does not meet the normative organization pattern. This research points to a strong normative convention governing the extemporaneous speaking event. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]