Archive for January, 2012

The President, Howard Herbert welcomed everyone and gave a resume of the content of the meeting before introducing Neil Wilson, the Chairman for the evening. The timekeeper was Jeff Denton.

 The first speech was given by Ann Wickert who spoke about the benefits of Golf Croquet under the title Come and Join Us. Ann made a good case for everyone to become involved with their local club. An evaluation of the speech was given by Niki Boersma. This was followed by Jan Millar’s speech about the infamous Glencoe massacre entitled Murder Most Foul which evoked strongly the terror and the sense of betrayal felt by Clan McDonald. The evaluation was by Chris Clissitt.

 The chairman for the Topics session was Howard Herbert and the theme was kept a mystery initially until it became evident that all the words on which people were asked to speak were related to the Universe in its many forms.

 Jocelyn Brooks evaluated the Topics session and Caroline Boom gave a full appraisal of the whole meeting. Neil Wilson then handed the chair back to Howard Herbert who closed the meeting.

Wetherby Speakers Club member Chris Clissitt was a double winner in the Association of Speakers Clubs Area Contests held in York on Sunday.  There were three separate categories of speaking skills under scrutiny in the contests. The first was Topics where each contestant was required to speak for three minutes on the title “Actions Speak LouderThan Words” without advanced knowledge of the subject and with no preparation time.  This gave Chris his first win of the afternoon with Clive Dawson of York Railway Institute Speakers Club coming second.

The second category was a Prepared Speech which was won by Helen Tait of York Railway Institute with a fascinating speech entitled “Whispered Words of Wisdom” about Helen’s success in developing the ability to communicate with horses, acquired on a Horse Whisperers Course.  In second place was Helen’s co-member of York RI Club, Lindsay Dutch, with a speech about the sinking of the Titanic. It will be the 100^th Anniversary of the disaster on 12^th April this year.

The final contest challenged the contestants’ skills at Evaluation, where they were required to analyse another Speaker’s performance and provide constructive advice on how to improve. The contestants all evaluated a speech by Aileen Minns entitled “Causing a Flutter” about her experiences in raising chickens.  The speech was designed to allow Aileen to develop her vocal skills.  The Evaluation Contest gave Chris his second win, beating Andrew Hodge into second place.  Chris will represent the Vale of York Area in the next round of the National Speaking Contests on 19^th February.

President Howard Herbert opened the first meeting of 2012 which was chaired by Jeff Denton. The Club’s Evaluation Contest formed the main part of the meeting. Contestants were required to demonstrate their ability to give comprehensive and constructive advice to enable a speaker to improve his or her performance. All contestants evaluated the same speech which was given by John Holian and entitled “Mind Your Business”. In this speech John gave his views on what is good and bad about modern business methods. Judges Mavis Cryer and Peter Wilson announced Howard Herbert as the winner and Peter Nellist as runner up. Both will go forward to the Area Contests in York on 15^th January.

John Holian then chaired an unusual topics session where members were required to undertake two tasks simultaneously. They were asked to speak for two minutes on a variety of topics based on topical phrases without any preparation time, and were also given a specific related task such as to focus on the use of gestures or humour etc. Jeff Denton evaluated the topics session.