Toastmasters Speech Evaluations: Dissecting the Message

George Bernard Shaw, the Irish playwright and social activist, allegedly observed that the United States and Great Britain are two countries separated by a common language.  The same trap awaits any Toastmasters programme that skips its own vocabulary.  An evaluation is a judgement, an assessment.  In this context, it concerns a speech delivered.  The word itself traces to the mid-nineteenth century, from the French “évaluer”, a portmanteau built from the Latin “ex-”, meaning “out,” and the Old French “value”.  It means, quite literally, to draw the value out of something.  That etymology is not decoration.  It is the entire job description.

The Purpose of Evaluation

Project evaluation serves two functions, and most people only remember the first.  The obvious one is technical: assessing a speech’s structure, its points of acclamation, its points for improvement.  The second function is the actual reason Toastmasters exists in the first place.  The evaluator must ensure there is a next speech, and another after that.  He must encourage, educate, and inspire the speaker.  An evaluation that fails to accomplish this has failed, regardless of how technically accurate its criticism was.

What an Evaluator Does Not Do

Evaluators overstep their role constantly, and the mistakes are not confined to beginners.  Senior Toastmasters, ironically, commit several of these errors more often than newcomers, having grown comfortable enough to forget the boundaries of the job.

Recounting the speech is the first and most obvious error.  The audience already heard it.  Re-enacting or repeating the project speech entertains nobody and helps the speaker even less.

Duplicating the roles of the language evaluator and the ah counter is the second.  The language evaluator addresses grammar, morphology, and rhetorical devices, not the structure of the speech itself.  The ah counter tracks pauses and filler words, and a competent one explains where and why they occurred so the speaker can correct them.  Neither role belongs to the project evaluator, and folding their work into his own is redundant, not thorough.

Becoming personally involved in the speech is the third, and it afflicts senior Toastmasters and Distinguished Toastmasters with particular regularity.  The audience exists to be moved emotionally by the speaker.  The evaluator exists to notice that movement without being consumed by it.  Just as the speaker adopts a speaker persona, the evaluator must adopt an evaluator persona, remaining neutral, above the emotional current of the room.  An evaluator swayed by pathos cannot honestly assess whether the pathos actually worked.

Making the evaluation about oneself is the fourth, and perhaps the most self-indulgent.  Bringing knowledge to an evaluation is necessary.  Bringing the baggage of personal experience is not.  Even where the evaluator has walked the same road, eaten the same food, met the same people described in the speech, the story belongs to the speaker.  It is his hero’s journey, not an invitation for the evaluator to reminisce about his own.

The Structure of an Effective Speech

Evaluating a speech properly requires understanding what a good speech actually is.  A good speech is a complete journey.  It opens with a statement, sometimes framed as a rhetorical question.  It expands on that statement, carries the audience through development, and argues a cogent, coherent position designed to sway them toward it.  It then returns home, circling back to the opening statement, now transformed into a call to action, propelling the audience to continue the hero’s journey on their own terms.

Depending on the audience and material, the speech must balance logos, pathos, and ethos.  The speaker wears the mantle of the speaker persona, and his task is convincing the audience that he channels their own thoughts, hopes, and fears back at them.  That is what the evaluator is listening for.

Coherency

The first thing to assess is the logic of the argument, its coherency.  An incoherent speech loses the audience, and the spell breaks.  The evaluator’s job is identifying exactly where that incoherency occurred and addressing it directly.  Where the speech is cogent and contextual, the evaluator must say so, and explain why, because good work can always become better work, and both directions deserve equal attention.

Values

Next comes the ethical dimension of the hero’s journey: whether the speaker’s actions align with the story and the character he has presented.  A disconnect between stated belief and demonstrated action is the evaluator’s responsibility to flag.  Alignment deserves the same attention, highlighted specifically to reinforce what the speaker is already doing correctly.  There is always a reason people do what they do, and become who they become.  The evaluator’s task is understanding that reason well enough to name it.

The Emotional Rollercoaster

People are, ultimately, creatures of feeling, prisoners of their own history, their fears, their melancholy, their hatreds, their loves, their hopes.  Every listener searches for themselves inside every story told.  The evaluator’s job is noticing where the delivery and the story align, and where they diverge, and naming both honestly.

“Vocal Variety”

Few phrases in Toastmasters have been reduced to meaningless filler as thoroughly as “vocal variety.”  What does it actually mean?  How does it affect the speech in question?  Which direction, specifically, should the speaker move toward?  A speech is not a play.  It is not a re-enactment of a life event staged for dramatic effect.  It is a recounting of an event, carrying a message and an intent.  Nobody is performing Shakespeare in the Park.  Any recommendation involving vocal variety must be quantifiable and measurable, or it collapses into cliché, offering the speaker nothing he can actually act on.

“Use the Stage”

The instruction to “use the stage” suffers the identical fate.  Not every speech requires movement, and treating stage movement as a universal virtue ignores context entirely.  A speaker delivering remarks in the capacity of a public officeholder or policymaker should not be wandering the stage.  He is the focal point of the room, and his task is capturing that attention and holding it without dilution.  Movement, in that context, breaks the gravitas the moment demands.  At its worst, it signals indecision, incredulity, even a lack of credibility, precisely the opposite of what the speaker is trying to project.

Three Points, or You Are Nagging

The evaluation itself begins by addressing the speaker directly.  For the duration of that evaluation, he is the centre of the room, and the evaluator’s own presence becomes secondary to his hero’s journey.  My own preference runs to three points of acclamation and three points for improvement, no more.  There is frequently more worth saying, and resisting the urge to say all of it is the entire discipline.  Detailed analysis belongs to a mentor, working privately and at length.  The evaluator’s role is highlighting the good and the bad clearly enough for the whole room to learn from it, not producing an exhaustive breakdown nobody in the audience has the capacity to absorb in one sitting.  Exceed three points, and the lesson goes over everyone’s head, or worse, demoralises the speaker entirely.

What to Avoid

Newer evaluators frequently apologise for their own feedback.  This is a mistake.  Apologising for an honest assessment diminishes both the evaluator’s credibility and his own confidence, and the words a person hears himself say shape him as much as they shape his audience.

No evaluator should ever claim a speech was perfect.  That is a lie, and everyone in the room knows it.  No such speech exists.  However strong a speech is, another point of improvement is always available.

Some evaluators swing to the opposite extreme, denigrating the speaker outright.  This is equally wrong.  Nobody begins as a finished speaker.  That is the entire reason project speeches and evaluations exist in the first place.  Being trusted to evaluate someone’s hero’s journey is a privilege, not a licence to tear it down.

Summarising

Every evaluation must close with a statement of broad intent, one that inspires the speaker toward the next speech rather than away from public speaking altogether.  Watch for breadth versus depth, the credibility of the story, the veracity of sources and quotations, and the transition between points.  A credible speech rests on verified facts and properly attributed quotes.  I am particular, deliberately so, about quotation attribution and scientific accuracy.  Far too many speeches lean on cliché built from misconception, outright fabrication, or superstition.  A good speech educates.  It does not spread misinformation dressed up as inspiration.

Beating the Clock

Time management follows its own discipline.  A speech evaluation runs roughly three minutes for a reason.  Psychologically, tolerance for sustained criticism is limited, which makes diplomacy in delivery an art in itself, one that must still elevate and inspire the speaker rather than simply cushion the blow.  By the green light, the evaluator should have covered every point of acclamation and begun the recommendations.  By the yellow light, he should be transitioning toward the summary.  By the red light, that summary should already be underway.  Thirty seconds remains more than sufficient to close.

In Closing

Speech evaluations form one half of the Toastmasters journey, and a genuinely capable Toastmaster is proficient in both halves of effective communication: the ability to speak, honed through project speeches, and the ability to understand, honed through project evaluations.  Neglect either half, and the whole discipline remains unfinished.

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Terence Nunis, DTM | Division Advisor, District 80 Division M | Club Advisor, AIA Toastmasters | Past President & Founder, Awesome Toastmasters