Ed Wischmeyer's Concise Club Guide

Dr. Wischmeyer has been a Toastmaster for over 20 years, and was a Charter Member of the SRI Organons. He was their second elected President, and their second member to complete the CTM. He was with TGIF Management Toastmasters for 16 years, and was their 35th President. In addition, he has served in most all other officer positions. He has been Educational Vice President for each club, and wrote a computer program to equitably schedule members for all tasks, including pre-requisites for each position. He has competed in speech, humorous, and evaluation contests, and has won about a hundred ribbons in club meetings, evenly split between Best Speaker, Best Evaluator, and Best Table Topics. He has also given any number of technical presentations and several after dinner presentations.

Introduction

"There's lots of ways to skin a cat," the saying goes, and there are lots of different styles of doing Toastmasters assignments. Different styles will have different strengths and weaknesses, of course. Much of the educational benefit of Toastmasters comes from examining the different styles and trading off the fine points. There is much less benefit to following a standard, any standard, "just because." The style advocated below has multiple worthwhile goals:

• to prepare Toastmasters for opportunities outside the club, based on the premise that mastery of Toastmasters skills is not in and of itself the primary goal, but rather a means to accomplishing far more significant goals in the "real world."
• to focus on the audience as a customer, and to hide, and not emphasize, the mechanics of the meeting
• to provide the self-satisfaction of genuine accomplishment, not just the empty rattle of ritualistic applause
• to be artificially formal, so that formality is mastered and not feared
• to provide an environment in which sound, honest criticism can be respectfully given and gratefully received
• to help members become discerning critics of the meeting process, so that they can tailor meetings to be appropriate to the circumstances
• to provide an environment which is rewarding, worth attending, and worth supporting because the comunications are based upon genuine human interaction. This generates a community, an environment worth attending, even in the absence of goal quests.

Concise Club Guide - The Details

Every meeting participant

• Smile, have fun, share the fun
• Start by addressing the one who called on or introduced you, then "Fellow Toastmasters, welcome guests." (I think that the phrase "most honored guests" is highfalootin and inflated.)
• Finish by repeating the title of the one who introduced you or called on you, such as "Mr. Toastmaster" or "Madam Tabletopics Master."
• Don't take away the leader's opportunity to learn by "helping" start applause
• Stand to be recognized as you would in a formal meeting, don't wave a hand like you would in school
• When mistakes occur, don't point them out brashly and immediately. Figure out a way for the mistake to be corrected in a way so nobody will notice that any mistake occurred.

• Never draw attention to mistakes, just work through them.
• Don't apologize!
• Always lead the applause.
• In introductions, speaker's name always comes last so the audience knows when to applaud. Holding the speaker's name till last is a simple way to strengthen an introduction. Moving the name up earlier is a simple way to weaken an introduction.
• Anybody using the lectern should have a complete introduction. (This style implies that tabletopics respondents and speech evaluators should not be at the lectern. Besides, there's real world value in learning to speak from within an audience.)
• Person coming to the lectern goes in front, person leaving the lectern goes behind. (We frequently do this backwards...)
• Shake hands at the lectern, not off to the side. Make sure the lectern stays occupied.

• set the emotional tone for the meeting - upbeat, smile, etc., as appropriate
• focus the attention on the meeting participants, not on the Toastmaster (no opening monologues)
• have all meeting participants (including President and Sergeant at Arms):
• be there on time
• know how to excel at their job (get the General Evaluator to make sure those folks are up to speed.)
• seek smooth meeting flow
• hide the mechanics of the meeting (during the meeting, don't ask the Timer for 90 seconds for comments, for example. Do that in advance!)
• cover over any mistakes

• A speech introduction is a benefit both to the speaker and to the audience, helping to bring them together by setting the audience expectations (anticipation) and by reassuring them that those expectations will be met. In the club context, it is also a great way for members to get to know more about each other, especially with personal details. In Prescott 104, the speakers normally provide a written introduction, but this is not enough -- that furnished introduction probably won't say much about the speaker, just about the speech, and it for sure won't have anything in it to let you use the theme of the day in the introduction, or to let you segue between speakers, and to fit that introduction in how you want the meeting to run. If you wait until you get a written introduction at the meeting, you'll deserve what you get.
• Introductions should include these points
• here is a topic of interest to you, the audience
• the speaker is qualified to talk on this topic because... (extra credit for making this personal, for talking about how you know the speaker)
• here are the details of the speech, including the title
• make speech introductions interesting - publish speech objectives, don't read them in detail
• don't summarize the speech in the introduction!
• You don't absolutely have to use the theme of the day in the introduction, but if you choose to, do it gracefully and unobtrusively. Weak introduction: "When I asked the speaker about today's theme, she said that she likes roses because they remind her of spending extra time in the summer with her mother." Stronger: "Roses remind her of spending extra time in the summer with her mother." Try, in the whole meeting, to never say the phrase "today's theme." Use it gracefully and unobtrusively.
• speaker's name is the climax of the introduction, and always comes last so the audience knows when to applaud
• observe the audience for time they need for writing comments, not a fixed time from the timer
• focus on (pay attention to) the speaker when sitting
• here's a challenge - give introductions without notes
• have meeting principals sit near the front so there is no dead time waiting for folks to walk up to the front
• make sure that all members get a chance to participate in the meeting
• "please welcome" means welcome to the lectern. Don't welcome somebody who will be talking from their seat, such as an evaluation team member (Timer, Wordmaster, etc.) telling the attendees what the evaluation ground rules are.

• focus attention on respondents, not on self with a long introductory monologue
• call on all members who do not have assignments. If there's time, call on more than just 4 members.
• ask questions that help us get to know the speaker - how they feel, what they think, what they've done. Intellectual questions tell the least about the respondent and are usually generate the least interesting responses.
• call for a report from the Timer and the Wordmaster at the conclusion of Table Topics.
• when you ask the audience to vote, tell them how to fill out the ballot and what to do with it.

• This seems to vary a lot from club to club, so I won't make any general comments here.

• make sure that the whole evaluation team (below) know their duties, how to do them well, and will be on time. (done in many clubs, but not in Prescott. In Prescott, apparently nobody takes formal responsibility for making sure that people know how to do their jobs, and this is a major weakness.)
• introduce team at the start of the meeting
• don't give "spark plug" awards just because, give them to somebody who really deserves it. You don't absolutely have to give that award.
• run the evaluation section, using objectives above
• comment on all aspects of the meeting
• do not give speaker' names early in the meeting, because that spoils the introductions.

• explain to the audience, especially guests, that everybody is welcome to vote. We never do this!
• explain to the audience, especially guests, how to fill out the ballots. We never do this!
• explain the collection process, especially to our guests. We never do this!
• in our club meetings, there is very little time to determine the winner. Here's a fast way to do it. Remember, your job is to determine the winners, not to count how many votes each person got.
• Step 1 -- sort the votes by Best Speaker. Usually, it will be obvious who best speaker is, but if not, it's easy to count the bigger stacks. You'll easily be able to remember who the Best Speaker was, so you don't really need to write it down.
• Step 2 -- do the same thing for Best Evaluator.
• Step 3 -- do the same thing for Best Table Topics.
• Step 4 -- from the ballots that voted for the Table Topics winner, choose one that also voted for the winning Best Speaker and Best Evaluator.

Ah Counter

• explain counting in appropriate detail -- not too much, not too little.
• get a helper if required so fewer ahs are missed.
• the purpose of counting Ahs is to help individuals improve, so give specific results by name.

• record good and bad uses of grammar and words. Don't let grammatical mistakes be missed.
• report on well phased sentences. As a club, our word pictures are few and weak. Encourage them!

• select a word with multiple uses, not just one cliche usage
• verbs are strongest, adjectives are weakest
• choose a word that you use, but not a common word.
• The wordmaster position provides two challenges -- (1) to expand vocabularies with a new and useful word and (2) to think on the fly to use the word, and to use it correctly!

• don't get carried away with giving too much detail when introducing job
• correctly state meanings of light colors (green light is not minimum eligible time!)
• at the start of the meeting, give all of the times for the lights
• timer is final authority on eligibility
• reports are best done as follows:
• for Tabletopics, just eligibilities
• for Evaluators, times of the evaluations and eligibilities
• for Speakers, times of the speeches and eligibilitie

• give opinions as to what they liked. If you make absolute statements about the speech being good or bad, that's judgemental and you are placing yourself in a position of superiority above the speaker. If you express your ideas as opinions, they will be much more palatable to the speaker. When you say, "here are some tips," you are placing yourself in a position of being a teacher and a superior. Positions of superiority threaten interpersonal communication and make it easy to take an evaluation as a personal affront.
• opine what they would have liked to have heard
• evaluate delivery, not just content
• don't repeat the speech, don't tutor - evaluate. Too many Prescott evaluations are 80% rehash, or more. Weak: "You talked about growing up in Kansas." Stronger: "I liked [opinion, not judgement] how you strengthened your speech [evaluation] by using growing up in Kansas as a point of contrast to your later career."
• use gestures, vocal variety, etc. in the evaluation
• thank the speaker only at evaluation contests! They are not giving speeches so that you can practice evaluating.
• Inappropriate: "Here are some tips [I know more than you]". Better: "Here are some things that I like / I've learned / were taught to me [we're all learners, I just happened to have a head start. Here's how to catch up and overtake]".

• Challenge -- all members should become connoiseurs of the meeting process, not just of the speaking process. All should comment on meeting effectiveness.Weak phrase -- "I would like to..." Well, go ahead! "I would like to" is a trite vocalism that substantially weakens your presentation, and should only be used deliberately for effect. We should practice strong speaking practice, not idly ignore speech-weakening cliches.
• Gestures -- in the same way that we practice vocal variety, we should practice gesture variety.
• Explaining your duty -- don't do it! The audience doesn't care what your duties are, they care about things that affect them, not you. For example, the audience cares how the voting works, how ballots are collected, and whether guests are allowed to vote. They could care less that the Vote Counter's "duty" is to collect the ballots and tabulate them.
• Applause -- Many Toastmasters seem to think that everybody and every thing should be applauded. This is the equivalent of "ahs," but expressed with your hands. Applause is appropriate at three times:
• For the audience to express approval for a major job well done, such as a speech. Minor jobs, such as a Timer's Report, should not be applauded as a matter of course.
• For the audience to express its approval for some new person to come to the meeting and preside at the lectern.
• When the person at the lectern leads the applause. Don't "help them out" by starting applause from the audience, because you take away their opportunity to learn when you do their job for them by leading applause.