Written by Elena.
Introduction
With a guest (visiting from London Athenians club in Hammersmith) taking the Best Topics speaker award and a regular member winning best speaker for a speech about the mystery surrounding Shakespeare’s life, it was another great meeting.
The evening was hosted by past club Secretary and experienced member Kate. Having greeted everyone upon arrival, she went through the evening’s agenda under the theme “The Future of Work”. Grammarian Wayne and Timekeeper Carrie provided functionary support by overseeing good use of language and time management respectively.
Prepared speeches
The first speaker Marco spoke passionately about his subject – Politics in Italy – in a No. 2 speech entitled “Politics or Antipolitics”. He described the background, current political situation in Italy and attempted to solve the dilemma whether future government of Italy should be political or technical. In the conclusion of the speech he stated – it does not have to be as it is!
Ahmed gave his No. 5 speech “Soul/Funk Music – Yesterday and Today”. He explained that soul music comes from America and Ray Charles had been a pioneer in this genre of music during the 1950s. It was also very popular in the 1960s when Ahmed first learned about soul music from his uncle and he has kept passion for this kind of music since then.
Jo presented a well-researched speech No. 7 entitled “Good Will Hunting” about a “mystery” writer – William Shakespeare. She revealed that there are no genuine portraits of Shakespeare or even a written description of what he had looked like. Also, signatures show six different spellings of his name, there is no diary or letters to find out more about his life, and no record (except one) of him speaking his own voice. She also argued that Shakespeare’s language had been very innovative as he had invented 2000 words that we still use.
Joe persuaded the audience to change their attitude to work in his No. 9 speech entitled “This Means Work”. He provided three tips how to do that: to find meaning in your work, work hard (like competitors in the Paralympics) and follow your heart (like Richard Branson). At the end of the speech Joe invited the audience to work hard to help overcome the current economic recession.
Speech evaluations
Angela evaluated Marco’s speech about the Italian political system. She “approbated” (word of the day: approbation = praise) his very clear message, his use of a picture from a newspaper with jokes to enhance it, relaxed pace and natural body language. Angela noticed that speech could have been improved by working on voice projection.
Steven started his evaluation of Ahmed’s soul/funk music speech by stating what Ahmed had done well – equally distributed eye contact throughout the audience so everyone felt engaged, a chronologically organised speech making it easier to understand, and the use of hand gestures to add some comedy effect. In Steven’s opinion sometimes unnecessary movements distracted the audience from the main message.
Evaluating Jo’s Shakespeare speech Christopher pointed out the subject was very engaging and Jo had collected a lot of interesting facts including statistical data. Christopher particularly liked Jo’s description of Mr Fisher (her teacher) and the finale of the speech. The only recommendation was to use the stage a bit more.
The last evaluator Glen evaluated Joe’s persuasive speech about working hard. He commended Joe’s very supportive body language, great eye contact with the audience and the use of rhetorical devices. His main recommendation was to add a call to action at the end to make the speech more powerful.
Table Topics
The Topics Master for the evening was Elena, who prepared interesting and challenging questions for volunteers within the theme “Back to School”. She asked the audience to play the role of a class of 4 to 5 year olds who are “a bit naughty” and ask the teacher lots of questions. Each Table Topics speaker played the role of the teacher who was to teach the children on a given subject and deal with any disruptions and questions.
This evening we had science lessons about:
- British woodland habitants
- A comparison of wild cats and domestic cats
- How do humans differ from animals?
- Animals found in your back garden
- Animals with spots
- A day in the life of a monkey!
Awards
Closing the meeting the club President Femi gave out the awards based on the votes cast during the evening.
The Best Evaluator award was given to Glen for his evaluation of Joe’s speech. The Best Table Topics Speaker award went to the guest from London Athenians Speakers Mendora for her Wild vs Domestic Cats Table Topic, and the Best Speaker award went to the club Secretary Jo for her well-researched speech about Shakespeare.
The President’s discretional award went to Elena for the successful Table Topic section.
Next meeting
Our next meeting is on Monday, 8th October 2012, upstairs at The Clerk and Well pub, 156 Clerkenwell Road, London, EC1R 5BX.
