Three great speeches, an educational mentoring session, very fun Table Topics and helpful evaluations made this meeting another exciting event at U-CAN-SPEAK.
Daniel was awarded a Spirit of Success Certificate from Toastmasters New Zealand, that recognises the successful completion of his first five speeches. Evaluator Joanna was impressed with Daniel’s effective use of gestures to support the content of his speech “The Role of Assumptions”. Advait’s inspirational speech “Stop being nervous” marked the completion of his Competent Communicator award. As always, Advait showcased his great humour. His confetti shower added a great special effect, but it made cleaning up after the meeting quite a tedious job for him! Vaughan outlined the key qualities of a good coach. In a role play, he coached Ross on how to handle the time of uncertainty while awaiting the results of a cancer test. Ross played his role so well that – hadn’t we known it was all fake – we would have had no doubt Ross is indeed worried about a cancer diagnosis! Vaughan approached his assignment very emphatically and tactfully. In our mentoring session we assessed a range of sample slide shows. Some were horrible, but we loved one on how to brew beer! Overall we found there are a number of no-go’s for slides:
- text based slides
- bulleted lists
- small fonts
- weird slide backgrounds
- slides that look all the same (e.g. corporate design)
Features that we found convincing in the beer presentation were
- high contrast
- graphics rather than text
- custom design
- minimal content per slide
If we include bar charts on a slide or draw one on the whiteboard / flip chart, we discovered how we can use different drawing techniques to emphasise or understate an increasing / decreasing trend in the data: Skinny bars drawn closely together make different heights stand out with great impact. Conversely, different heights are less apparent when we draw fat bars with large spacing in between. Finally, Table Topics Master Steph had a slide prepared for each participant. First, there was only one line with a general topic. Once speakers had started to build a story on that topic, they were asked to unveil a second line with more information, a later another line. It was quite a challenge to adapt the speech to the added bits of information, and this gave us even more great opportunities for lots of laughter!
U-CAN-SPEAK 