Speaking123 Podcasts

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 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.

This speech is Project 4 “Presenting a Technical Paper” from Advanced Manual “Technical Presentation”. The objectives of this speech are

• Deliver an interesting speech based on a technical paper or article.
• Effectively use a fliipchart, overhead projector or slides to illustrate the message.

The timing for the presentation is 10-12 mins.

I attended my company’s internal tech forum few weeks ago. I was impressed by one of the presentations on the copper pillar bump technology. I find the new packaging technology is interesting and the flow of the presentation was quite logical. So, I decided to use this presentation material as the basis for my speech project. The first thing I needed to do is to filter out all the confidential information from the presentation. I also needed to reduce the level of technicality since the toastmaster audiences are largely non-technical or not in the semiconductor field. Fortunately, I am a tech guy and have been working in the semiconductor industry for more than 10 years, so I am quite familiar with the topic and only need to spend minimal effort on the preparation of this speech.

I presented the speech at the CCK TMC and NTU Alumni TMC Joint Meeting. I felt my speech went well although as usual I missed out some portion. But I was sure most of the audience did not understand what I was talking.

This speech is for Advanced Project 3 “The Nontechnical Audience” from Advanced Manual “Technical Presentation”. The objectives of this speech are

• Understand the principles of communicating complex information to nontechnical listeners
• Build and deliver an interesting talk based on these principles
• Answer audience questions that arise during the presentation
• Use overhead transparencies to illustrate your message

The timing for the presentation is 10-12 mins.

At first, I would like to talk about a topic related to my profession in the semiconductor industry. However, I felt most of the audience would not be able to understand the topic. I had to choose a topic that could be readily simplified to layman terms. I thought Internet topic is the easiest to achieve that since I believed most audience would know more or less about internet. However, after giving two technical speeches on CCK TM website in my AP1 and AP2, I decided to talk about something else on the topic of internet. After some googling, I decided to talk about Web 2.0, the second generation of Internet. I thought the topic might be interesting to the audience and also to myself.

In order to make the speech more engaging, I had designed a simple interactive game to involve the audience in guessing which website was Web 1.0 and which one was Web 2.0. I was quite please that the game turned out quite well received.

The speech was presented in the CCK TMC Oct Chapter Meeting. The evaluator was our club adviser DTM Poh Kim Siong. He pointed to me that I missed out the Questions and Answers session for audience to clarify on the topic. Ya, it was in the manual. I overlooked it.

This speech is Project 2 “The Proposal” from Advanced Manual “Technical Presentation”. The objectives of this speech are:

• Using a systematic approach, organize technical material into a concise presentation
• Tailor the presentation to the audience’s needs, interests and knowledge levels

The timing for the presentation is 8-10 mins.

This was my first advance project. I was quite excited, but at the same time I was not sure how to do it. For the advanced project, the focus was not so much on the basic tenets of speech, such as body language, vocal variety, but more on giving speech in various scenario. I chose Technical Presentation as my first advanced project series as recommended by our club charter president Shenton Sng.

For the first AP, I chose Joomla since I thought the topic was more relevant to the audience or also I was working on it.

One thing I learned from the Technical Presentation is this “inverted pyramid” method. In the “inverted pyramid” format, essential information is given in the first few paragraphs of a story. So that, the presenter has the flexibility to cutting the presentation at any point without losing the message. But for this speech, I had not applied this method. I will use this method in my next project.

I presented the speech at the CCK TMC Aug Chapter Meeting. The evaluator was Raj Kumar.