A typical Toastmasters Meeting
1. Prepared Speeches presented by Club Members. Each speech has a set specific goals from our program, and each speaker has a personal evaluator who gives feedback on their speech. There are up to three prepared speeches are given at each meeting.
2. Table Topic Session practises impromptu speaking. The Table Topics Master has prepared topics, and some of the participants are asked to speak for one to two minutes.
3. During the Evaluation Session the speakers are given specific feedback on their speeches, highlighting what made the presentation strong & suggestions for improvement.
4. Word of the Day. One of the members presents a new or little known word for us to learn and records the number of times each person uses it during the meeting. This serves to increase everybody’s vocabulary. At the end of the meeting the Wordmaster reports on how many times the word of the day was used in the speeches, table topics and evaluations.
During the Evaluation Session
The evaluation session is where feedback is provided, not just to the speakers, but to all members. The evaluation session is headed by a General Evaluator, who calls on individual speech evaluators to give a 2- to 3-minute evaluation of an earlier presentation. After the evaluators have finished giving their evaluations, the General Evaluator calls for the helper reports:
– The Grammarian records grammatical errors and reports these at the end of the meeting.
– The Ah Counter keeps track of audible pauses such as “ah,” “er,” “um,” “well,” and “you know”. These are also called ’embolalia’, which are unnatural pauses or fillers in the flow of a speech.
– The Timer reports how much time each speaker, table topics responder, and evaluator took to give his or her presentation.
– The Wordmaster reports on how many times the word of the day was used.