Winninated!
One of the most important aspects of the Toastmasters experience is evaluation. Every formal speaker receives both written and verbal evaluations for their speech from another member, to help them improve their skills. But providing the evaluations is also a skill. The goal is to be positive, and supportive, while still offering concrete ideas on how to improve, and it's a tough task to listen to the speech, do your analysis and provide your evaluation, all in a span of minutes.
Every spring, Toastmasters has a contest set for Evaluation. Like the other contests (International Speech, Humourous Speaking and Table Topics), you start by winning your clubs nomination, then go to an area contest, amongst 4-6 clubs, the winner of that goes to a division contest (amongst 8-10 areas), while the winner of division goes to district (our district is all of Ontario except the Northwest, and East).
The Evaluation Contest is an interesting structure. They have a single speaker from outside the Area go up and give an original 5-7 minute speech. Often these are speeches that the speaker is planning to use in the International Speech competition for their own Area. Then the Evaluation contestants leave the room. They have five minutes to make whatever notes they might like on the speech, then their notes are taken away. One by one, they return to the speaking room and present their evaluations. Judges in the room judge the evaluations.
Last night was the Area 1 contest and I was there competing on behalf of the Big Blue Toasters. I pretty much knew I'd make it out of my club, because I had to cajole other people into even competing. But our area is full of pretty enthusiastic clubs, so knew I'd be in tough for competition there. I'm proud to say I won the competition (and the big tacky trophy that goes with), which means I will be competing in the Division B contest on the 31st. I don't hold out much hope for winning Division, but I've never competed in these contests before, so I'm pretty excited just to get the chance to move up one more level.
Relevent Links:
Toastmasters International
Toastmasters District 60