After you?re a famous celebrity writer following your many television and radio appearances, it?s only natural that you be in demand to speak at conferences on the craft of writing. You?d better know how to put together a presentation for the time required that provides value to the attendees and thrills the conference planner. Fortunately, Toastmasters has a program to help you learn the nuts and bolts of putting together a speech. It?s called The Competent Communicator (CC) manual.
The CC manual has ten projects that will get you started speaking and teach you the building blocks of good presentations.
You?ll start with the Ice Breaker project. This is a 4 to 6 minute speech in which you?ll introduce yourself to the club. There are two objectives for this speech: to help your fellow club members get to know you as a person and to help your mentors identify what speaking strengths you already have.
Toastmasters is a strengths-based program, so this project is really where we start building a plan that will help you progress through the rest of the manual successfully.
In the second project you?ll learn the basic organizational structure of a speech or presentation, and in the third, you?ll learn about staying focused on the purposes (general and specific) of your speech.
The second and third projects look very basic, but they form the foundation on which all subsequent speeches are built. Don?t sell them short. Hard work on these projects will pay big dividends for you down the road.
The fourth project is a natural for writers. It?s all about choosing the right words. If you?re like me, you?ll hear cliches and jargon come out of your mouth that you would never put in your writing. This project helps us learn to speak as mindfully as we write.
The fifth and sixth project are about adding vocal variety and body language to enhance your message.
In the seventh project, we learn how to incorporate research into the speech and in the eighth we begin to use visual aids. These are critical skills for your conference presentations and workshops.
The ninth project teaches us how to use persuasion in our speeches and the tenth is where we learn to inspire our audience. These two final projects call for us to pull together all the skills we learned in the previous projects to create a spellbinding presentation.
The CC manual is brilliantly written. Its deceptively simple appearance in combination with the mentoring you?ll receive in Toastmasters provides you the opportunity to develop speaking skills while having fun. I like the CC manual so much that I just finished my 5th or 6th time through it. (I lost count!) I learn something new every time I repeat the projects.
Never fear, however, there is even more to learn beyond the CC manual. I?ll talk more about that in the next installment of The Top Ten Reasons Why Writers Should Join Toastmasters.
Photo provided by Norsk Bibliotekforening
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