League Policies

1. The changes to Speech Rules for 2025 have been approached with three major goals in mind:
   Simplification
   Transparency
   Clarification

   Simplification:
   For the past several years, the Speech Guide has contained General Rules, Timekeeping Rules, Category Rules, Event-Specific Rules, and Script-Submission and Script-Use Rules. The 2025 Speech Rules will only contain rules for each specific event. (i.e., All rules for Apologetics will only be in “Apologetics Rules.”) Timekeeping guidelines, script-submission guidelines, tournament protocols, and other helpful information and examples will still be found in the 2025 Speech content but will not be considered rules which could receive a penalty.

   Transparency:
   The 2025 Speech content now includes a Penalty Addendum which lists the type of penalties that can be applied to certain rule violations, along with examples of each. Find these in the Compliance FAQs.

   Clarification:
   Most of the changes to the Speech Rules for 2025 come from separating rules that can receive a penalty from tournament protocols and guidelines. Other changes come from rewording rules for the sake of clarity.

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