Criteria of a good speech

Before go to bed, I just wish to put on few words to this blog. I attended a seminar held by Toastmasters Club in KDU Penang on last Saturday. The seminar with title “Speech Contest Judges Training Program” was actually to teach us how to be a judge.

To be a judge for the contest, a person not only need to be a member of Toastmasters Club, he must have completed 6 projects for Communication Competence (CC) and above.

Although I haven’t reached to the level to be a judge, but at least, I know what does the judges look for in a good speech. The judges are just the ordinary audience as the rest of the people in the contest. It’s just that, they have the authority to judge people, to give marks to the contestants.

From the perspective that judges are looking for, I know how I should do in order to deliver a good speech. It is not only for the judges to judge how good I speak, but it is to train up my speaking skill in order to have better communication skill and presentation skill with people. Below are the criteria of a good speech delivered to the audience.

1. Challenge the mind – it’s to challenge our mind to give a speech / message which is out of the ordinary one. Do not under estimate the audience. They can be cleverer than you. So, we need to think of the contents that are beneficial to the audience. Make sure they will bring home with some useful information. Thus, we need to study a lot, do survey, so that we are delivering the correct information to the audience.
2. Touch the heart – Be yourself, and create connection with the audience. Tell something that you have experienced and be informative to the audience.
3. Tickle the funny bone – To make the audience enjoy your speech, and not to be a too serious one. It can be a humorous speech, which do not need to be funny, but will let audience think about it, and laugh.

I know, the above 3 points are only the theories. I will need to practise more to get those 3 points realistic. How far I can go to train up my skills? I do not have the answer, but I would like to try, so that I know, how far I can increase my own value of competencies.

The most challenging part of each meeting, is the table topic session, as we need to talk about a given topic on the spot. This is really challenging my mind in order to think fast, not only take care of the messages that I would like to pass to other people, but also need to take care on the grammar, vocabularies, body language, eye contact, etc. This is not an easy way, but I know, I have to go through that, no matter how, no matter what.

I remember, last time, one of my teachers told me, if I would to improve my English, I would need to train up myself, not only to “speak” in English, but need to “think” in English too.

Ha, anyway, I still like Chinese a lot. I will never stay away from Chinese, just because, I am a Chinese. ^^

Good night, everyone!