How to Pick a Piece for Speech Contest

WARNING, IF YOU KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT IHSSA OR SPEECH YOU CAN SKIP THE FIRST PARAGRAPH.

So in my state we have a thing called IHSSA (Iowa High School Speech Association) which is basically a giant competition which includes everyone in the state of Iowa. So the way that speech works is that depending on if you are doing an individual category of if you are in a group event you will pick a piece to work on practice and then preform for competition (this also can change depending on what category you are in). When you start competing you start at districts which is where about 70 schools come and compete. At competition you preform you have one judge and are rated on how well your performance was (1=Excellent t 2=Good 3=Fair 4=Disqualification) the way you move on from districts is that you have to get a 1 in your performance. After districts you get about two weeks to relax and prepare for state which is the next level, (the reason why I bring this up now is because my high school is hosting state). State is obviously a lot harder than districts. Instead of competing against 70 schools your competing against about 130, instead of 1 judge you have three, and the only way you have a chance of moving on is getting a minimum of at least two 1’s. The reason I say chance is because you then have to get nominated by your judges to move on to the top of the top all-state. I am not going too to go into the process of how they decide who goes to all-state is so complicated to explain even I don’t really understand it. So if you do get picked for all-state there are two possible categories of all-state preforming and non-preforming. Non-preforming all-state is that you were good enough to go to all-state but there wasn’t enough room for you to compete. And finally all-state preforming, this is the best of the best come to compete, and it is also the hardest to win, because instead of you getting judged base off of scores, you get judged based on the judges preference. And if you get all the way to all-state and win, what do you get? A banner, that’s it (you also get bragging for the rest of the year but that’s about it).

So you’re probably wondering why I went through so much trouble to give you that huge explanation of what IHSSA is and what it is all about, well I am going to help you. I personally know that a lot of states around the country have something very similar to IHSSA, and I feel like helping out my fellow competitors. But how am I going to help? Well I am going to give you some advice on how to pick your piece to perform for speech. And we are going to go step by step both for large group and individual categories.

Individual categories

Step 1: Pick something you can relate to.

In almost every individual category you can pick what piece you want to preform so if you are pick something that is close to you. This can comedy, drama, anything really.

Step 2: Make sure it matches the category that you are in.

This is a very simple point make sure that it fits the category.

Step 3: Make sure it’s short or can be edited down.

There are time limits to every speech category so do make sure that the piece you do pick is within the time requirements of the piece.

Step 4: Make personal edits to the piece.

Now this isn’t saying that completely re-write the piece (which is something you can technically do), but to help make the piece more personal add something to it to make it your own.

And that’s it for individual categories now on to large group categories.

Large Group

Step 1: Find a piece that works to every one’s strengths.

When it comes to large group a lot of the times your director will pick the piece for your group but if for some reason they don’t find a piece that really works to a least one strength of every person in the group.

Step 2: Make sure it matches the category that you are in.

This again is a very simple point, make sure that it fits the category.

Step 3: Make sure it’s short or can be edited down.

Again there are time limits to every speech category so do make sure that the piece you do pick is within the time requirements of the piece.

And that is really all the advice I have for picking pieces in large group and individual Speech contest. I do know that this was a very long blog post but I felt that if I didn’t give an explanation of what exactly speech was, a lot of people would have been extremely confused.