The meeting of January 22, 2019 will be a special meeting, since we will be holding a club contest (i.e. English and French humorous speech contests, as well as English and French evaluation contests).

Although it won’t be in the standard weekly meeting format, it’s still quite interesting to check out. For example, this is how an Evaluation Contest usually unfolds:

• There will be a target speaker (i.e. someone presents a speech, and this person has been selected beforehand to prepare a target speech to give for the purposes of the contest). All of the audience will get to hear and appreciate the speech. The evaluators will all be evaluating the same speech.
• The contestants (the evaluators) will then be asked to leave the room and take a few minutes to prepare their evaluation notes.
• The Sergeant-at-Arms collects all the notes, which will be handed back to each evaluator as he/she comes back into the room to present his/her evaluation. (The order of evaluation will have been been previously determined by drawing straws.)
• Each evaluator has a chance to give his/her evaluation, making sure to provide constructive feedback to the target speaker and making sure to speak within the allotted time.
• Finally, what makes it quite interesting for the audience members is that we get to have a sense of the different evaluation styles and we notice what the evaluators pick out in common as well as any special points that each individual evaluator may have noticed that the other evaluators have not mentioned. This give us the opportunity to compare to what we would have said ourselves had we been asked to evaluate the target speaker. This is a great learning experience because it allows us to, in a sort of way, “learn through osmosis”.

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Here is the programme for the St-Lawrence Toastmasters Montreal Club contest of January 22, 2019.