Written By: Steven Bisby (IPP) Immediate Past President, Edited By: Donald Sweeting VPPR (Doncaster Speakers)..
The meeting kicked off slightly late, but it highlighted the multiple skills of our members as Charlie stepped in as Ah Counter and Steve stepped in as Time Keeper as there were some last minute changes of plan as some people were unable to attend the meeting as originally thought.
Andy also multitasked during the evening, first as Sergeant At Arms setting out the housekeeping rules for the evening and then following that up by performing the Toastmaster role. The Toastmaster is like a compere of the evening keeping things to the agenda and introducing up to the stage the various roles when it is their turn to speak.
Andy welcomed the 3 guests and explained what Toastmasters is and went through the statistics of how many members and clubs there are round the world.
Congratulations were given to club members Stephanie & Rai who competed at the weekend in the area contest for the Table Topics and Humorous competition and both came out on top.
Steve explained the time keeping role and why good time keeping is important in life.
Dan explained his role of Grammarian and introduced the word of the day people had to try and get in to their speeches, the word was Uptick.
Charlie was next as Ah Counter, his role is to look out for those crutch and filler words people use instead of just taking a big breath and pausing whilst their mind catches up what they want to say.
Introduced by her evaluator Rai, Elizabeth was the only speaker of the evening with her prepared speech entitled “The Capture”, a clever story that you thought Elizabeth was in danger but there was a twist at the end as it was actually a story of her Romanian rescue dog Maggie.
As Elizabeth was the only speaker she duly won best speaker of the evening.
To end the first half Andy ran an education session on how to breakdown a table topic speech into a beginning, middle and end to give it a good structure.
The second half started with Rai’s evaluation of Elizabeth’s speech and then we moved on to the impromptu speaking part of the meeting.
Val was Table Topics Master with questions around life that people had to try and give a quick personal story on subjects such as: most embarrassing moment, proudest moment, happiest childhood memory etc.
The winner was Charlie with his childhood memories.
With a minute’s gap for voting Andrew was called to the stage to evaluate all the Table Topics and he fitted it all in to his 6-minute time slot and gave a commend and recommend to all who spoke.
Dan was back up with a summary of good language used and who said the word of the day the most. Following Dan was Charlie with his Ah Counter report.
Steve finished off the evening as General Evaluator, evaluating all the Evaluators and the evening as a whole.
To end the night’s voting Andrew gained the best Evaluator ribbon.
Doncaster Speakers 