One Clap Speech and Debate
One Clap Speech and Debate is a resource for Speech and Debate coaches and competitors. We interview heroes of the Speech and Debate community about the transformative power of the activity and work to provide free and helpful content for Speech and Debate enthusiasts. Lyle Wiley, an English teacher and Speech and Debate Coach in Thermopolis, Wyoming, hosts the show.
One Clap Speech and Debate
Camp One Clap 2, Episode 6: Crafting Powerful Platform Speeches with YuYu Yuan
6:6 - Camp One Clap 2024: Day 6
For notes and details about the episode, check out the website here:
https://www.oneclapspeechanddebate.com/post/camp-one-clap-2-episode-6-yuyu-yuan-on-picking-and-writing-the-speech-you-like
Unlock the secrets to crafting speeches that leave a lasting impact and that will be personally exciting and satisfying with YuYu Yuan, a seasoned speech coach and Stanford senior. Join us at Camp One Clap as YuYu breaks down the art of selecting a topic that's not only relevant and relatable but also original and impactful. Dive into practical strategies for thorough research and personal engagement, transforming your chosen topic into a powerful narrative that resonates with your audience. Packed with actionable tips and motivating stories, this episode is your guide to unlocking your unique writing style and continuously improving your work.
If you’d like to join the discussion here at One Clap Speech and Debate, shoot me an email at lylewiley@gmail.com or reach out here on the website.
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Your voice matters!
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well, hey, campers, I love the smell of podcast in the morning. You're here at day six of camp one clap two on the one clap speech and debate podcast and, even though we're smack dab in the midst of the clapocalypse, we've got some great content from Cheyenne East alum and co-star of the half-hour podcast, uuun. I'm your camp director and host of the One Clap Speech and Debate podcast, lyle Wiley. I hope everyone is prepared to confront any terrors that come their way so that they can have a great season this year. Hey, quick reminder, check the One Clap socials for today's social media challenge. It's been so fun to see everyone checking into the challenges. Please keep it up. It's given me a lot of energy to keep this camp rolling. All right, let's learn more about UU.
Speaker 1:Uuun is the assistant program director and coaches platform speech at Palo Alto High School. She's a senior at Stanford, majoring in both ethnic studies and anthropology. Uu competed at Cheyenne East High School in public forum, debate, original oratory, extemporaneous speaking program, oral interp and poetry. She's a three-time national qualifier, getting to out rounds in PF and the top 30 in oratory. She's a state champion in oratory and public forum and an NIE TOC semifinalist in oratory During her free time. Yu Yu enjoys dancing with Stanford Chinese Dance, free writing, baking, crocheting and binge-watching shows on Netflix. Today, yu Yu is here to share some smart and helpful thoughts on platform speeches, specifically selecting the topic you like and writing the speech that you like. So it's time let's sit back and learn from Yu Yu.
Speaker 2:Hello speech and debaters and welcome to the clapocalypse. My name is Yu Yu and you may know me from the Half Hour Extent podcast, or you may have seen me floating around like a ghost at the tournaments that you've been to this past year. But if you don't know me, I'm an East High alum and a speech coach at Palo Alto High School in California and, for my part, in this survival guide, I want to give you tools you can use to attack your biggest monsters Picking a topic that you like and writing something that you like Emphasis on something that you like. Writing something that you like Emphasis on something that you like. And as I've been spending this past summer fighting my own demons to figure out how to write, compose and put together an honors thesis, I've also been thinking a lot about writing composition in general, specifically what makes a good speech, and rethinking the ways that my own speech curriculum could be better for next year's apocalypse. After some thought and conversation with a bunch of my writing friends, here's what I've come up with and I hope that this will be helpful to you, but if not, it's just me yapping.
Speaker 2:But anyway, this podcast episode will be organized into two parts. First, we'll explore the ins and outs of choosing a topic and answering the age-old question how in the hell do you pick a topic that you could stick with for a whole year? And then we'll talk about my biggest fear and my demon that I'm battling right now is turning the topic that you've chosen into a speech or an essay that you can be proud of. But first, how do you pick a topic? And before we can answer that question, we need to think about the core aspects of speech generally. You can find on the NSDA website that they will train judges to judge based on three things Relevance, relatability and originality, and I think these three things are the core aspects of writing a speech. So before you go and pick any random topic that you see that interests you, think about how relevant that topic is to today's world. In any case, you should be able to answer the question why should we talk about this topic now and not five years ago, or not in the next two years? Why now? You should also pick topics that can affect other people as well.
Speaker 2:Remember that this is speech. It's meant for an audience to listen to, and if they can't relate to a topic because it's hyper-specific to your own experience, then they won't feel connected to your speech. And lastly, I'm not saying that you have to come up with some novel idea in order for the speech to matter or to be competitive, but I am saying that you should think about how you can contribute to the broader public's understanding of the topic that you've chosen, and this requires a lot of work. This requires asking questions, doing research and seeing what other people have already said about this topic and thinking about how you can add to it in your own way. And this is how you make the speech original by incorporating the information that you found with your own understanding of the topic. So, yes, nothing is truly original or novel. At least nothing you hear in the speech and debate world is going to be, but that's okay, and it's not what we're aiming for anyway. What we're aiming for is figuring out how you can understand topics and how you can share that understanding to an audience. So now that that's out of the way, how do you actually choose the topic?
Speaker 2:In this age of brain rot? It's safe to say that there's a lot of information out there that you're absorbing within a matter of minutes, and while the tidbits of information we're listening to are mildly interesting enough to keep our attention for two seconds before moving on. Did you know that those two seconds could turn into hours if you go down the rabbit hole? The point is, there shouldn't be a moment in time where you feel like you have nothing to talk about or choose from. You should actually feel like that there's too many topics to choose from. So if you're thinking that there's nothing out there that's interesting enough, important enough or worth asking questions about, I need you to keep reading and keep scrolling until you find something and realize that there's a lot of information that you have access to. Okay, okay, I'm just kidding. I don't actually want you to rot your brain too much, but this does take us to the second piece of advice I want to share with you.
Speaker 2:Many people have different processes in how they get to a topic. They can either start with a case study, a personal story that they've read online, or take inspiration from a personal experience and go from there. But if you're not even at the step, I would encourage you to find three topics, stories or moments in your life that provoke you. Basically, topics that make you ask questions about the hows, whys, whats, etc. This way, it keeps you engaged and curious throughout a whole year. So how do you know when you've chosen a topic that you're satisfied with? Well, even if this is cheesy, I'm still going to say it, because when you know, you know, and what I mean by that is when you get to a point where the questions start to connect back to the world and the society that we're living in and starts to show importance. That is the topic. This topic will make you consider how it affects our relationship with other people and you get to a point where you know that this is a topic that is significant and you can't wait to share to everyone else why this topic is significant and why they should care. You can also start with the question how does or how has this topic impacted me? From here, ask yourself the question does it impact other people in the same way? Is there a broader topic that I can connect it back to?
Speaker 2:But if you're stuck at three topics or seven topics or no topics, keep reading and finding things that interest you. I recently read a piece by Ruth Behar, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan, and her advice to writers is to read more, write less, which means that you can only write as well as what you read. Yeah, sit on that for a little bit. If you feel like that. The topic you've chose is overdone or there's not much more to it, chances are you haven't read enough or found enough information to add to the conversation, meaning you haven't found enough information to form your own opinion about it. So while we're all dreading having to read more and would rather watch TikTok videos all day why not go down a rabbit hole of information and explore a topic more in depth to see what else there is that you can write about and comment about and form an opinion about?
Speaker 2:And at this point it's a perfect transition to part two of this episode and my worst nightmare how in the world do you write a good speech? There's so much that I could say about composition and writing, because it's been haunting me for the past couple of months okay, in all honesty, it's been haunting me since I've started doing speech and debate because I just can't write for the life of me. I feel like my own perfectionist tendencies prevents me from being able to write something, and I just get so overwhelmed that I stop, and I just don't want to do it anyway. So, in my opinion, writing is one of the hardest things to do well, and writing a speech that resonates with a wider audience is even harder. I'm sure by now that you may know the general tips of writing a speech, for example, writing it in an essay format with three body paragraphs, an introduction and a conclusion. Or writing with an audience in mind, knowing that your judges are probably going to be parents, and writing just to get the words out. All of which are amazing tips and things to think about when you're writing.
Speaker 2:So instead of repeating these things, as I'm sure I and other speechies have rambled about them in other OneClap episodes, I want to tell you something a little different. Instead, let's talk about what to do after you've researched and picked out all of the pieces of information you want to include, or what to do once you've completed your first draft. I'll say, always start out with a first draft, or even just free writing. So, once you've collected enough information to be able to form a coherent opinion about the topic, just yap on the page and I mean literally write what comes to your brain for 20 to 30 minutes, and after time's up, you're left with something that is new could take you to newer places for your speech, give different directions and really bring your attention to things that you haven't considered before. But, most importantly, you have words on a page. It's a good start and usually after 30 minutes I know I can type about a thousand words, which means you should basically be finished with your speech Almost. Obviously, it needs a little bit more TLC, but it's a good start.
Speaker 2:When the ideas are there, you can now start thinking about composition, and I want you to think about writing a speech like composing music if you're a music person, but if you're not, think about writing a speech as if you were writing a story or a narrative, with the beginning, a rising action, a climax, a falling action and a conclusion. This is because a well-written speech requires good pacing. I think this is something that all of us have heard whispers about but may not have talked in depth about. I know I saw this happening on the national final stage this year when I was watching Oratory Info and while listening to their words and seeing their performance, it hit me that pacing has a lot to do with how well the audience is receiving your message. Let's face it sitting through an Oratory or Info round can be so excruciating because they're long, the information can be heavy and our attention spans right now can't handle it, especially after we've been competing the whole day.
Speaker 2:So when you're composing your speech and figuring out what parts go where, think about how you want to capture your audience's attention and remember that these next 10 minutes is your time to play with. So if putting two very emotional stories next to each other is too much to handle all at once, break it up into different chunks and put into different parts of your speech. If you're giving too much context and taking too long to get to the point, then think about shortening your explanation or phrasing it in a different way. Are there too many jokes going on all at once? Does the joke not even belong in this section? Do people even understand the joke, etc. A good way to figure out where the slow points of your speech is or where part of your speech doesn't make sense is to just ask your teammates, coaches or even friends and family members to listen to your speech and have them count however many times they started to daydream or got distracted by something else happening in the room.
Speaker 2:I'm also a big advocate for recording yourself performing and watching yourself perform. I know it's cringy and I know we never want to do it, but I think that this is the best way for you to improve your own performance, because you can also give an opinion on what worked and what didn't work. And my last piece of advice on writing is that everyone has their own style. It's like a thumbprint. No two essays about the same topic is going to sound the same, I mean, unless they're both written with the help of ChatGPT. But use this to your advantage your own writing style, not chat GPT.
Speaker 2:If you say you suck at writing or think that other people write better than you do, that's not necessarily true. They just have a different style that suits them better. And I'm not talking about making grammar mistakes or anything similar to that, because if your writing is convoluted or has mistakes or makes no sense or you don't have the right grammar, your friends, coaches and teachers and literally anyone listening to your speech can tell you that, and it's an easy fix. I'm talking about the way that you construct your sentences, the way that you explain the pieces of information that you found and the way you analyze your topic. That is unique to you and your writing style. Also, know that your writing style can change throughout the year because as you hear other speeches and gain more feedback and read other things, you'll realize that there could have been a better way to phrase certain sentences to get the message across clearer.
Speaker 2:And at this point I'll also tell you to read your past speeches, read your old writing assignments from English classes or other piece of writing that you've done to get a better sense of how you are as a writer.
Speaker 2:Then, when you've figured it out, hone in on your style of writing and play around with it, change it up, use it to your advantage, because, as everyone around you in speech and debate will tell you, your voice is your own and the way you explain things will bring new and exciting questions to the table, because it's you and you are your own unique person.
Speaker 2:Well, that's it, folks. If you have any questions or comments you would like to share with me, please, please, please, feel free to reach out to me through email, which you can find on my Tabroom Paradigm page, or even through Instagram. I promise I'll answer. I will always answer, because I love talking about writing and how to write well, even though it sounds really nerdy, but that's just where my life has brought me. So, other than that, I want to give a big thank you to Lyle for the One Clap Camp series and all the work that you've been doing on the podcast and especially inspiring this episode. I also want to thank Addy, ella, brianna, josh, lindsay and Marky, as well as my friends from California, eric and Kai, for sharing with me their wisdom and processes on speech writing. That's all from me, and I hope you can survive the clapocalypse.
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh. Thanks so much to Yuyu for her work here at Camp One Clap. It's great to hear you use thoughts on writing platform speeches and learn from her here at camp one clap. What's new at camp tomorrow? Well, friend of the podcast, josh Thompson, is back to chat about facing fears and speech and debate. You're not going to want to miss that. Remember social media challenges are live for every day that. We have camp this August and we'll see you tomorrow campers. Oh yeah, and sorry about all the dumb jokes. I know, I know I've been making apocalypse jokes like there's no tomorrow. My bad For Camp One Clap. This is Camp Director Wiley signing off.