Introducing Toastmasters, a club for improving public speaking skills

Svetlana Stoyanchev

SLTC Newsletter, January 2009

Technical presentations play an important role in a scientist’s career. For the scientists in speech and natural language processing, like many other research fields, conferences and workshops are the places that allow researchers to share their work with peers, learn about research of their colleagues, and find future collaborators. Despite the importance of presentation skills in a scientist’s career, an informal survey I conducted on students and graduates from seven different universities found that computer science graduate programs often lack formal training in presentation skills. Although graduate students do usually receive comments from peers and supervisors about the technical content of their talks, the advice about presentation itself is often limited to comments about length and amount of detail in the presentation. Students seem to rarely receive advice on how to improve their core presentation skills. Without an effective presentation, solid technical work risks going unnoticed.

It is a common misconception that being an effective speaker and ability to speak confidently in front of an audience is an innate talent. In fact, these are skills can be learned by anyone and can be of great help in anyone’s career. This article highlights one non-obvious venue for this training available to many graduate students and researchers: Toastmasters.

Toastmasters International is a nonprofit organization started in 1924 that provides public speaking training and helps its members become better speakers. There are currently 11,700 Toastmasters clubs in 92 countries, and New York City alone has 70 clubs. The clubs meet bi-monthly and provide a flexible way for people with busy schedule to improve presentation skills. Toastmasters members come from different career paths. At Toastmasters members learn a number of techniques that help them become better presenters, overcome stage fear, and deliver their speeches more effectively. The learning is done through theoretical explanation, practice, and detailed evaluation. Among others Toastmasters exercises include learning to use gestures, vocal variety, how to effectively make a point and inspire your audience. These meetings provide a friendly atmosphere and detailed evaluation for the presenters. Each Toastmasters member makes short 5 – 10 minute speeches as frequently as their schedule allows on a topic of their choice. Each speech has a focus on one of the speaking skills, like using metaphors or getting to a point effectively. After a presentation, a speaker receives a detailed verbal evaluation from other meeting participants with constructive criticism as well as positive encouragement about the speech.

Besides making prepared speeches, each Toastmasters meeting has a "Table topics" session, where one of the participants prepares a set of questions. This exercise allows one to practice giving an impromptu speech in front of an audience.

In my experience attending Toastmasters meetings for the past six months, my view is that students and researchers can gain a great benefit from Toastmasters’ informal and flexible meetings. Joining the program costs around $100 a year. Anyone can try out different meetings for free as a guest until they find the right club. I believe that Toastmasters can improve the presentation skills of researchers across a range of experience levels, from new students with limited experience to highly proficient instructors. I encourage researchers interested in honing their presentation skills to find a Toastmasters chapter near you and try it.