The Public Speaking Blog

At this point, I’m half-way through the Toastmasters programme and determined to complete it. However, life gets in the way. I moved away from Maidenhead and no longer work there.

I am looking for a new club but this will be a hectic year for me work-wise so I probably won’t join a new one till early next year.

Our VPEd, David, gave an educational speech on creating powerful openings. He followed one of the Toastmasters standard speech outlines, modifying it ad-hoc in a very David way.

One comment stood out - “If you’re going to tell stories, make them your own,” he said. “Don’t tell other people’s anecdotes. ‘Goes down like a lead balloon. Relate them to yourself.”

You might think the core focus of Toastmasters would be speaking, and you’d be right, but a big part of Toastmasters centres around evaluation too.

On Monday night, we had two contests, testing the club’s skills in both speaking and evaluation.

Evaluation is important as this is how we improve. If you’re making mistakes,  as a speaker you’re very often unaware of them. However, you do need to be told gently - public speaking is scary enough without having every fault dissected and analysed in front of the whole group. Considerate evaluation is an art.

In the evaluation contest, there was a single speech. Each evaluator made 5 minutes’ notes before their notebooks were taken away. Then, they were all taken to a side room, and asked to come out and give each their evaluation in turn (so they couldn’t hear their competitors’ comments).

For the speaking contest, speakers each delivered their chosen topics, with several judges for each speaker. On a normal evening, each speaker has a single evaluator - for the contest, the judges evaluate all speeches against set criteria. These points are added up, and the speaker with the best overall score wins.

Sheila gave a particularly memorable performance, based around “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”. I half expected her to tell us how to gear up to be more successful in business, but instead she told us to focus on the really important thing, making time for our friends and family. It was powerful stuff.

This is one of the things I like most about Toastmasters - you never know what the speakers will say. Or how it will affect you.

As Grammarian, you count the “um”s, “ah”s and “er”s speakers make throughout the evening, along with pauses, words such as “so” and “and” which speakers will overuse to buy themselves time to think. Speakers are often completely unaware they’re making these noises.

So as Grammarian you sit there with a clipboard watching for all these little mistakes.

Earlier this month, I got my first chance to try it out.

In addition to finding mistakes, it’s a good idea to look out for interesting phrases, and pretty much anything else involving clever use of language. For example, I was able to award the (worthless) accolade “best heckle” for one particularly witty outburst.

Perhaps the hardest part about being Grammarian is breaking it to them gently. Inevitably, someone will make a large number of “um”s or “er”s. If you include them all, they can end up with an um-count way ahead of their peers.

Some Grammarians like to dodge this by not being specific. They will say “Bob had a lot of ums and a couple of ahs”, rather than tell Bob he really said um 22 times in a five minute speech. (Come on, sort it out, Bob!)

I started off by reminding everyone I’m the least qualified person for the job. You need to pay attention to be Grammarian, and yet I’m so inattentive that, when I was timer, I let poor Norman talk for five minutes on a two minute table topic - because I’d forgotten to start the clock.

So, I told them, if you have a low um-count, it might be that I wasn’t paying attention. And if your um-count is high, it could just be that you were so interesting I actually took note.