At Toastmasters we love giving out awards and the theme of our last Toastmasters meeting was “Victorians’ award show”. Taking charge as Toastmaster of the meeting was Fahad. Assisting him as timekeeper was Eleanor G who took this role for the first time. We love to have unusual words of the day in Toastmasters meetings and tonight’s one by our grammarian Stephen was “pizazz”. Maria and Andrew S completed the crew as respectively harkmaster and vote counter.
We had five speakers on the agenda. The first one Alex was beginning his Toastmasters journey by doing his icebreaker speech “A little bit about me”. Here we learnt just that, including his job as actuarial consultant and his travels in India, South America and Nepal. The second speaker for the evening was Nadia “King Solomon – Debating what are we here for and what’s life all about?” in her speech Nadia covered part of Ecclesiastes and the importance of not taking a text out of context. The third speech “Life with Jim” was by Olivia. In a crafty twist the subject was her relationship with gym and how by exercising more she became happier and stronger. Our fourth speaker was Annabel “Shop Now” who covered the history of shopping from ancient Greeks, to modern supermarkets to a future of drones and virtual reality. The final speaker was Nuala “Design is about people” who explained more about her job as aircraft interior designer and the three main end-users to take into account; economy class passengers; business class passengers and flight attendants.
The beauty of Toastmasters is that everyone who speaks receive a through verbal and written evaluation of his/her speech. Evaluating Alex was Thomas who recommended a slower speaking pace. Isabelle as evaluator of Nadia’s speech praised her clear structure but suggested she uses no notes in the future. Andy evaluated Olivia’s speech, praised her intriguing introduction but highlighted that the speech should have been outlined at the start. Terry took on the evaluation of Annabel’s speech and commended her for her clear structure. Finally, John evaluated Nuala, praising her use of the stage but recommended adding more pauses at key points in the speech.
After a short break, the meeting reconvened for a table topics impromptu speaking session. Keeping up with the movie theme, our table topics master AK asked questions such as “what’s your favorite movie line” “what’s your guilty cheesy movie?” or “Are there too many bad movies”. The session was evaluated by Eleanor H who provided thorough feedback to all speakers.
Maria and Stephen then came back for their reports. Following on from them was our general evaluator Chris from London Corinthians who evaluated the club, ambiance and everyone else not evaluated so far.
Congratulations to our best speaker Olivia, best evaluator John and best table topics speaker Florian.
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