Last week, and tonight I attended a Toastmasters meeting. I’ve been interested in this organization for some time, and am finally joining. I realize that as a storyteller. I need to improve my presentation skills, and it is my hope that this course will help me achieve that objective. There were some very nice people at both meetings.

As my blog, Rock soup, touches upon writing, storytelling, music, and even quilting, then why not speech? I would like to share some things I learned tonight about some of the do’s and don’ts when giving a speech.

There being three levels to the speech

1. Is informational ‘

2. To persuade

3. Inspire. He said inspiration is the most important level of speech should shoot for. I wager. Each of us have heard someone speak that has inspired us and that is a trait I would like to acquire.

–        The evaluator suggested that we engage our audience and excite them.

–        The body of an informational speech should be broken up into sections where you group similar topics together. That can help clarify the subject matter.

–        At the end of the speech you want to present a summary that will use some of the most important aspects of the content or body.

–        Some more advice I heard about speeches is that you want to avoid such phrases as him, you know, but, and etc.

–        another good point of advice I heard was that you don’t want to have a pronoun right after a noun. For example: Nathan, he went down the street is incorrect phrase. It should be Nathan went down the street.

–        The meeting seems to have different sections: there are those that assigned different tasks. One is a timekeeper, one monitors the is in and in the speech, one monitors taking notes of a speech to ask questions of the listeners. Later, and one is the moderator, etc.

If you have some things that you’ve learned about giving a speech, please feel free to share them in the comment section of this blog. Thanks.