Speaking123 Podcasts

This is my evaluation on P7 project “Research Your Topic” at the NOL TMC Chapter Meeting. The speaker was Peter Yeoh.

I forgot to point out one strong point on the speaker. He has a good sense of humor. I wish I have that attribute. Overall, I feel that my evaluation has shown incremental improvement. I have a better control of vocal variety in terms of pitch, volume and pace. You can compare this evaluation and my previous evaluation to see the difference.

I also seeked the opportunity to invite two persons to be the project evaluator and language evaluator for our next meeting. I felt Christine chaired the meeting very well. There was a gift exchange and a potluck dinner in this meeting.

This is my first evaluation for an advanced project. The speaker is Doris Ng from NUS Alumni Toastmaster Club. Doris is alao the current president for the NUS Alumni TMC. I was pretty impressed by Doris’s outstanding speaking ability on that night. She could give a rather motivational and uplifting opening and closing president addresses. On her opening, she urged the members to aim to be top-class speakers. On her closing address, she again provoked her members whether they are willing to be trained. In Toastmasters Club, nobody’s speaking ability is perfect, there is always room for improvement.

In my evaluation on this speech, frankly I did not really care too much about the content. This was because I knew for technical presentation, there was a pretty standard format which is similar to a technical paper. First it was the outline, followed by results and discussions, and finally a summary. Therefore, I focused more on her delivery. To be honest, there was nothing much to nitpick. She was very fluent, clear and confident. So, it was easy for me to comment on her strengths. It was more headache to think of areas for improvement. Fortunately, I did the same project a month ago. I knew the audience would pick on her jargons. So I taught her a way to be impunity from using jargons.

I also the NUSA TMC pretty interesting in two ways. First, the club is more cultured. The scripts of the speakers tend to be more linguistically stylish. Second, the TMEs mentioned that their members prided themselves to be brutally honest in their evaluations.

This is my first successful club series presentation. The script is available in the manual. Initially I thought this is a easy job since I didn’t need to prepare for the script. However, it turned out to be even more difficult than I expected. The script the script was pretty long and the style of writing was not my style of speaking. Therefore, I had a hard time to memorize the script. I tried to modify some parts of the script to suit my speaking style, nevertheless I still fumbled quite a bit in the actual presentation by forgetting the lines.

I hope to learn from this blunder and improve on my next successful club series. Definitely I need more practice before the presentation.

This speech is Project 5 “The Team Technical Presentation” from Advanced Manual “Technical Presentation”. The objectives of this speech are:

• Understanding the nature and process of a team technical presentation.
• Conceptualize a briefing or proposal involving three or more speakers, including yourself.
• Assemble a team of club members capable of getting the job done
• Orchestrate the planning, preparation and delivery of a team technical presentation.

The timing of the presentation is 20-30mins.

I believed many people might find this project quite difficult since it required a team project. However, in our work place, team project was not uncommon. For this presentation, I used a team technical presentation material from my wife’s company. She is working in the yield engineering department of a Japanese LCD manufacturing company. The technical team project is related to yield enhancement and defect reduction using six sigma methodology. Since I was not too familiar with LCD industry, I asked my wife to explain some of technical terms and content to me. I also asked her to help me to trim down the material so that the speech could be delivered within 20 mins. I also made up a scenario that this technical team project involved four members from various departments, and each member would speak on certain aspects of the project. In this presentation, I diid a role play for all the 4 hypothetical team members.

This speech was presented in the Hong Kah CC TMC on the 8 Dec 2007. The evaluator was Elissa Chan, ATMB.