Toast to this

Milledgeville Toastmasters, a weekly public speaking club, has recently been established by two Georgia College students.“Toastmasters is an international organization for public speaking and the way it’s formatted is to help people become more comfortable speaking in front of crowds,” Chase Hurlimann, senior rhetoric major and Toastmasters’ president said.

A member’s fist step to improving their public speaking is conquering their own emotions.

“One of the most important things is confidence. That’s, in my eyes, 90 percent of it (public speaking) is just being able to go up there and being able to control your fear of speaking,” Hurlimann said.

This is made easy by the way the Toastmaster meetings are set up.

“People are just scared to speak publicly, but they feel more comfortable in front of their peers. They can do funny topics, and we’re all there to learn so its an open and friendly environment, and its not a class, so there’s no pressure,” Alex Allison, junior rhetoric major and Toastmasters’ sergeant at arms said.

The meetings are comprised of three sections of tasks club members can be assigned to each week. A member could be graded by being selected as the timekeeper or grammarian, who records how many times speakers say “um,” “like,” and other vocal fillers.

“You come in and you don’t know what you’re going to speak on, but they give you a topic, and you have to give a one to two minute speech, just off the cuff,” Allison said.

The member’s could also be part of the main speeches.

“We also have two speakers every week that have prepared a speech, and we also have two evaluators that evaluate each one of those speakers,” Allison said.

The main speakers are given one speech with set goals out of the 50 different in the Toastmaster manual.

“The first speech you get basically teaches you organization and structures of how to perform speaking, the basics of speaking, and then as you go on and get more advanced, you just go on to more complex types of speeches,” Hurlimann said.

A new member’s first speech is focused around themselves and is used simply to break the ice. The evaluator responds to the speech and tells the speaker the things they did well, the things they need to work on and how they did on reaching their goals.

Members often don’t have a job every week, but each member does participate in table topics.

Despite the club founders being students at Georgia College, it remains independent from the school.

“So many things in Milledgeville run around the university. That it’s kind of a put off to people from the community,” Allison said. “So we’re also trying to make sure we appeal to the community, because that’s what we want to be about as well.”

The club currently has 30 members, the majority of which are students at Georgia College.

Jessica Magnuson, senior rhetoric major, said a benefit of Toastmasters is the practice she receives for her public speaking class.

“It helps once you get into your major classes, because I know a lot of people, who haven’t had a lot of experience talking in front of people, aren’t as comfortable when they have to give presentations.”

Posted by MarkWatkins on Feb 2 2012. Filed under Lead stories, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.