I'm back after a break to tell you about my favorite project in the Competent Communication manual.
I think all of the projects in the CC manual are great. They are fun and challenging with easily achievable objectives. My personal favorites include Vocal Variety (project 6), Your Body Speaks (project 5), and the ultimate scary one The Ice Breaker (project 1).
I think the greatest project is number 4, How to Say It. It challenges the relatively new toastmaster and those veterans repeating the CC manual to “Select the right words and sentence structure to communicate your ideas clearly, accurately and vividly.”
I love selecting words and sentence structure especially when I am encouraged to be vivid at the same time.
The key to a great How to Say It speech is selecting the right topic. I favor topics for this speech that involve describing sights, smells, sound, and scenery. Travelogues make a great topic as do descriptions of colorful characters. Most speeches lend themselves to straight noun and verb sentences to help you stay within time constraints. Not so the How to Say It speech.
It beckons you to slather your speech with the most descriptive adjectives and adverbs in your speech writer's toolkit. Layer it with luscious language. Load it with lilting, lyrical phrases. Tickle our ears with marvelous cascades of sound. We will be able to see vivid mental pictures if you fully succeed with this speech.
Vary your rhythm. Use some punchy sentences. After that, wrap us in blankets of beautiful effervescent phrases positively brimming with all of the colors of the rainbow your aptly chosen topic can support. Delight us with lavishly nuanced word pictures of the sights and sounds of your trip, character or event.
Feed us spectacular similes and marvelous metaphors to engage our minds and provide context for the new and marvelous places your words will inevitably lead us through. Awaken our hearts and minds with soaring cathedrals built of phrases that make us ooh and aah breathlessly.
Do that and your listeners will be delighted that you know How to Say It.
- Russell Pike, Club President
