Authorships and Sponsorships

The introduction is the beginning of your speech. It’s what gets the attention of your audience and judges (this is why many people refer to this as an attention-getting-device, or AGD). It’s what sets up your thesis or points. It’s what relates your peers to your legislation. In a sponsorship more than any other speech, it’s critical that you have a good introduction.

There are really three ways to go about this. The first is to give a brief history of what’s happened in the past in regards to the problem you seek to solve. Maybe mention a piece of legislation that worked at addressing this problem, and how your legislation will help further that goal. For bills on foreign affairs, mention the history of that nation and any troubles that they’ve had. Make sure to relate those events to current issues addressed in your bill. Below is an example of one of these historic introductions written for a bill regarding Taiwan.

In 1949, when Communist leader Mao Zedong founded the People’s Republic of China, a shadow fell on the world. As families starved and wars killed millions, a brutal, merciless authoritarian regime was born. Yet even today, as Uyghur Muslims are slaughtered, the people of Hong Kong are beaten in the street, and Taiwan is surrounded by the Chinese navy, the US has stayed silent.

The second way to write your attention-getter is to make the issue urgent and powerful, relating it to American values rather than the bill. The following attention getter is an adaptation of Jimmy Baek’s carbon tax sponsorship speech during the final round of Harvard’s annual tournament in 2022.

From the civic responsibility of our constituents to vote, to our responsibilities as Representatives on this floor, American democracy has always been about the responsibility we hold to each other. And yet, whenever our constituents home’s are swept away in a hurricane, that very pillar seems to crumble.

The last type of intro for sponsorship speeches is comedic. The point is to make a personal, often informal connection with the audience or judges. If done well, it will make you stand out well above the rest of the chamber in terms of uniqueness and interest. In certain cases, it may not be a wise choice to use these introductions. This is because many bills, such as many regarding North Korea, are heavily interconnected with lives at stake, and jokes can be seen as laughing at lives lost. With that caveat made, the following intro is adapted from Sasha DiMare’s carbon tax speech during the final round of Harvard 2022. Note that this was not a sponsorship speech, but it has many of the same ideas of it and would work very well in that situation.

In chemistry, I learned that carbon is the backbone of life. But even as someone who has failed a few tests, and still can’t seem to take notes on chemistry in my love life, I can still tell that the chemistry behind this bill is an equation for success.

Sometimes, these intros involve other speakers within the round, making fun of a part of them jokingly. For example, say that you took one speaker out to lunch so that he would pay for dinner, or something along those lines. It’s never a bad idea to include other speakers into your intro, but make sure you place them correctly and don’t say anything bad about them whenever possible.

There are also other types of introductions that are not mentioned above. AGDs like a crazy statistic or sentimental story are both great ways to introduce your speech, although they are not recommended for a sponsorship speech. Now, it’s important that your intro matches your speaking style, so don’t feel like you can’t go for some amazing intro you just thought of just because it doesn’t match one of the three categories listed above. The only thing really to avoid is “stock” intros, or intros that could be used on any bill. You want a sponsorship intro to be unique to the bill and something that will make people interested.

After the attention-getter there needs to be a quick connection to your contention. As quickly as possible, go from the general idea of the attention-getter (for the discussed attention-getters, these would be silence, responsibility, or chemistry) to the thesis or first contention of your speech. After this, get right into your claim.

The warrant and data for your sponsorship should be approximately the same as any other speech. They’re just as necessary and important to your speech as they would be otherwise. For warrants, make sure they are clear and understandable. For evidence or data, try and provide numbers wherever possible.

While effective warranting and data are extremely important to a speech, many other parts of a sponsorship are more important, and thus should be prioritized over these two areas. While you can definitely cut some time with the lack of refutations, the change to two points, along with extended status quo blocks and more in-depth effects means that these areas are some of the first to be shortened.

Although a more advanced tactic, it is also possible to skip the data entirely if your warrant is made inherently obvious through your status quo. For example, if you state that small businesses are experiencing a worker shortage, and that the bill gives money for small businesses to hire more employees, then your evidence was essentially in the status quo section. All you need to do is say that small businesses can hire employees and reduce their worker shortage.

Again, I mention this as an advanced tactic because it is often difficult to pull off. Congress is all about providing as much evidence as you can. If there’s an expert giving the same warrant as you, the expert is probably a better source than some high schooler. If you want to attempt this method, I’d recommend that you provide a more nuanced status quo with more than one source. For example, prove that there’s a worker shortage, and prove that it’s caused by a thing that the bill alleviates or gets rid of entirely.

Impacts are an important part of any sponsorship speech. Nobody knows why passing your bill matters, so you need to explain what it means for Americans. I like to think about these impacts split into two parts. One logical, and one emotional.

The logical part is the same as any other impact. If you prove that climate change will be mitigated, give a card about saving lives. The point is to bring every piece of evidence down to a level that affects an actual person, and should be used for every impact in a sponsorship speech. This logical part should be backed up by credible evidence, just like any other part of your speech.

The second part of a sponsor's impact is to humanize it emotionally. If your impact is that people die, explain what that means for the families of those Americans who no longer have a father or mother in their life, who have to live through the death of a close relative.

If your impact is instead about economic consequences, talk about what that means for low-income families who might go to bed hungry because there's not enough money to go around.

This humanization of your impacts doesn’t need, and probably shouldn’t have evidence. You don’t need a study by Harvard to prove that the death of a loved one is difficult.