Judges at the Club-level score participants as the Club determines.

 

Judges at the District level will score each participant’s speech based on content, organization, and delivery. For example, content scores tend to focus on originality, creativity, imagination, timeliness, the human interest, and application of the Four-Way Test. Organization scores tend to focus on the speech’s structure (ex., how effective is the introduction? how were examples used in the body of the speech? how did the conclusion wrap-up the speech?). And delivery scores tend to focus on diction, pronunciation, projection, grammar, clarity, articulation, tonal variance, and the extent to which the participant engages the audience (ex., gestures, eye contact, etc.). Judges will use the “Most Firsts” method (i.e., which candidate has the highest rankings – for example, two “firsts” and one “third” wins over three “seconds”) to rank participants. Speeches shall be no longer than 7 minutes in total; participants will be “cut off” at 7 minutes.