Finalists Diligently Fine-Tune Speeches

Future careers could be decided. Bank accounts could get fatter.

So much rests on the shoulders of the young orators facing tomorrow's audience at the 17th annual Martin Luther King Jr. Youth Oratorical Contest at Hylton Memorial Chapel in Woodbridge. But they have already gone through much more just getting to this point.

Lillie Jessie, co-chairwoman of the contest and the larger Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration, and her committee presented the topic, "We Said, 'Never Again!' . . . Hope for Those Unseen," to coordinators in each public middle and high school in Prince William County, Manassas and Manassas Park. The students' speeches should build on comparing and contrasting the Holocaust with present-day issues in Darfur.

Coordinators were handed a thick training manual and study packet in October and directed that speeches should be five to seven minutes for middle school students and 10 minutes for high-schoolers. They put the students to work by November.

"I was wondering, 'How can I write a five- to seven-minute speech?' " said Seth Opoku-Yeboah, 12, a finalist from Woodbridge's Benton Middle School. He entered the contest for extra credit and the prospect of winning up to $1,400 in savings bonds. "Once you start writing, you get more into it and get more ideas."

Finalist Emoni Matthews, 12, of Godwin Middle School in Dale City had the opposite problem. Her speech was too long. She signed up for the challenge because she thought it would combine her love of writing and the theater.

Finding the issues include many more countries in Africa than Sudan, Emoni said, she was forced to pare down her entry. "I probably would have been going on for hours and hours," she said.

For Cecile Diomi, there also were too many things to talk about. The finalist from Marsteller Middle School used research and a tight selection process to find the perfect examples to carry her point across on the stage, something she has wanted to do since she began singing about five years ago in the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Choir, which performs at the annual celebration.

"This is the first year I decided I was actually going to try," said Cecile, 13, an aspiring actress, speaker, dancer and singer. She was also inspired by her late mother's ability for public speaking.

All three finalists researched the specifics of their topics and wrote and rewrote their speeches.

"I wanted her to feel what she was saying," said Thomasine Parsons, Cecile's coach and an eighth-grade language arts teacher at Marsteller. "In order for her to feel what she was saying, she had to know, had to have some background information. Anybody can say, 'This is happening in Darfur.' She needed to know for herself what was going on."

The competitors stayed after school and worked on memorizing their speeches. They repeated them over and over to get the right cadence and intonation. They worked on their performance to make their speeches dramatic. They rehearsed when to rock back on their heels so the back of the auditorium would be sure to hear them and when a grandiose hand gesture was necessary to emphasize their point. They watched last year's finalists on videotape to pick up ideas for their presentations.