Yow Kia

What did I enjoy the most?
This meeting was a special one because it was a combination of speechcraft workshop and chapter meeting. I like to hear about the educational series: i) Take the terror out of public speaking ii) Introducing the speaker iii) Impromptu Speaking. This session has reminded me a lot of the fundamental speaking tips. There were around 8 speech-crafters took part in the workshop. I felt great to see so many people are interested in improving themselves, taking their first step to conquer the no.1 fear in the world – PUBLIC SPEAKING.

Who was the one left the greatest impression to me?
One of the speech-crafters, her name is Audrey. During table topics session, the table topic masters was eyeing on her and she was lucky to escape successfully most of the time. Since that was the first speech-craft session, the table topic title was given beforehand. Every speech-crafter must go out to deliver a table topic. When table topic masters voiced out the topic called “Shopping”, Audrey immediately stepped forward and told us that her favourite hobby is to do SHOPPING! She injected humour in her speech by telling us that she loves shopping even though her body size is not slim. Then, she shared with us the shopping that she did before and after marriage. Before marriage, she loved to shop for Hockey Stuff because she was a Hockey Player. After marriage, she often shops for household products. This has proved that everyone can speak if they are speaking in a topic that they are familiar with.

What did I do during the chapter meeting?
I was honoured to be invited to evaluate an advanced project from Story Telling Manual, project no.3: The Moral of the Story. The objectives of the project are: i) To understand that a story can be entertaining yet display moral values. ii) To create a new story that offers a lesson or moral. iii) To tell the story, using the skills developed in the previous two projects. The title of the speech is Get That Message.

The speaker first started off the speech by telling us that shopping is women paradise. And then, lead us to a shopping in a night market cigarette booth. It immediately grabbed our attention as we didn’t expect her to talk about a night market shopping.

The main characters of the story are Mr. Cigarette, and the audience. The sales talk from Mr. Cigarette was about the THREE ADVANTAGES of smoking. I felt that the word ADVANTAGES was used very effectively to entice our curiosity. This is because we all know that smoking is bad for health, there are only disadvantages. I was looking forward to know what the three advantages were.

The Three advantages of smoking are: i) Dogs will run away from you. ii) Robbers will afraid of you. iii) You will stay young forever. With these three advantages, the speaker again, piqued our interest in finding out why these three advantages could be related to SMOKING?

Towards the end of the story, the speaker disclosed why the three advantages can be related in smoking. First, heavy smokers look horrible. Therefore, the dogs will run away from horrible people. Second, smokers always cough at night time. In that case, they will be staying awake for the whole night. So, the robbers dare not to enter the house. Last, smokers die at young age. They have no chance to live older and hence, they will stay young forever. I felt that this was quite s successfully polished TWIST!

At last, Mr. Cigarette was caught by policeman because he was selling cigarette illegally in the night market.

In conclusion, the speaker concluded the story by saying, the moral of the story is “If you take the wrong path, turn back.” When she stated “the moral of the story”, I was kind of tricked by her. After a deep thinking, the moral of the story seemed like not matching with the story. I think, the more appropriate ones would be, “don’t sell illegal stuff in the night market” or “stop smoking”.

I have discovered one thing that majority of speakers, when they tried to do vocal variety in role play, they did it by lowering or raising the volume of the voice. This happened to the speaker too while she was acting as Mr. Cigarette. I think the effect would be better if the speaker could change the pitch and the tone of her voice.

All in all, I did laugh quite a fair bit.

Language use
Good use of language:
- It’s a fantastic lunch
- …. kill the mood …
- Your destiny is in your hand
- You need to have a vision and mission.

Wrong use of language
- The green card will be flashed. (wrong) => The green card will be shown. (correct)
- This side, that side. (not so good) => One end to the other end. (better)
- I not too clear. (wrong) => I’m not too clear. (correct)
- On the body part (wrong) => On the body of the speech. (correct)