Tips for International Speech Contest

Due to copyright and laziness, I won’t write out the judge’s scoring rubrics in their entirety, but here are some tips based on experience and said rubrics.

International
This is the only contest that proceeds beyond the District level. This actually continues on up until there is one World Champion of Public Speaking! Last year’s World Champion, David Henderson, competed against over 30,000 Toastmasters from over 100 countries and is from our own San Antonio!
Technically, this is a 5-7 minute speech on any topic. In practice, the winning speeches tend to be inspirational in nature. Personal stories expressing how you learned the importance of a general life lesson (as opposed to detailed how-to speeches) tend to do well.
The judges grade on the following, from most heavily weighted to least:

• Speech development: having an opening, body and conclusion with supporting material implemented smoothly. Keeps audience’s attention. Strong conclusion.
• Effectiveness: audience reception and judge’s subjective feeling of how powerfully the speech came across; speech purpose needs to be clear, appropriate to audience and speech needs to hold audience’s interest.
• Speech value: having a meaningful and original speech purpose. “The ideas should be important ones”
• Physical: appearance, body language and staying within the designated speaking area
• Voice: rate, volume, clarity, vocal variety
• Manner: enthusiasm, confidence
• Appropriateness of language: relevant and clear word choice
• Correctness of language: good grammar and pronunciation

As you can tell, having a well-organized speech with a powerful, clear purpose and keeping the audience interested the whole way through is very important. Again, stories can be powerful.

Pro tip: work with a mentor on your speech and even think about giving it in other clubs to get their feedback