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Toastmasters - Benefits of Evaluation |
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Toastmasters - Benefits of Evaluation |
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You may think, "Toastmasters is where you go to learn how to give better speeches." Well, yes ... But, we learn a lot of other things at Toastmasters. One of these other skills is the art of speech evaluation.
Of course, you hear speeches all the time ... at work, at public lectures, at religious services, at various kinds of clubs ... whatever, depending on the kinds of things you do. When you listen to a speech, you automatically evaluate it, that is, you decide whether or not you like the speech. That's human nature! But, when you go away and say, either, "That was a terrific speech!" or "That was an awful speech!", do you know why? Since I have been a Toastmaster, I have found that I am more likely to know why I like a speech or don't like it and for that reason, I get more out of speeches (even the regrettably bad ones!).
When you give a speech at a Toastmasters meeting, you will be assigned an Evaluator. The Evaluator will not grade or criticize you, but rather, will listen carefully - then mention a few of the things you did well and some of the things you might want to improve, next time. That's the basic reason we try to sharpen our evaluation skills in Toastmasters ... so that we can help each other.
Finally, there's one more benefit to learning the art of speech evaluation. As we learn to evaluate others, we apply the same objective evaluation skills to our own speeches. We learn to catch our own speaking errors and even better, how to try to avoid them. In fact, evaluation is such a special skill, we even have evaluation contests.
