Individual Events

Individual events in speech generally span the areas of public speaking, acting, reading, and interpretation. Competitive speech competitions, combined with debate, comprise the area of forensics. Different forensics leagues exist, each having a select number of speech events—these are generally determined by geographical region or league preference. Well-known forensics leagues include the National Forensics League, the American Forensics Association, the National Forensics Association, and the National Christian Forensics and Communications Association. Organized competition takes place both on the high school and collegiate level.

Original Oratory, or simply Oratory, is one of the most common speech events, and is the only public speaking event offered as a main event at the National Forensic League (NFL) National Tournament. In Original Oratory, a competitor prepares a speech on a topic of his or her choosing, and can be informative or persuasive in nature. Often, a competitor may use only one speech for the entire season. The purpose of Oratory is to inspire belief or reinforce conviction.

On the high school level, the speech is generally delivered without the use of visual aids or notes. In many leagues (including the two national tournaments listed below), the number of directly quoted words from other sources in the speech is limited (at NFL nationals, for example, the limit is 150 words). Speeches are generally between eight and ten minutes in length, with a warning often given when time has expired, although most tournaments give a 30-second grace period before a competitor's rank is dropped.

Persuasion is often considered the college corollary to Oratory. The focus of the event is to change, reinforce, or instill the attitudes, beliefs, and values of the audience. Although there are rarely rules that dictate what topics or formats are permissible in Persuasion, most persuasions are policy-based: speakers advocate a specific policy proposal to address some need and offer their recommendation in a problem/cause/solution or cause/effect/solution format. In 2006, for example, the winning Persuasion topics at the American Forensics Association (AFA) and National Forensics Association (NFA) concerned ways to improve teacher retention and to encourage citizens to correspond with their Congresspersons, respectively.

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