Table Topics Before or After Speeches?

Mandating the order of different meeting segments may seem silly and unimportant. It may seem strange that experienced Toastmasters can have very strong conflicting opinions on this—but the order in which you run parts of your meetings can make a difference in meeting quality.

Broadly, there are three major segments to a meeting: prepared speeches, table topics, and evaluations. Of course, there are usually a number of minor roles as well, often stuck in at the very start of the meeting.

Evaluations cannot come before speeches (unless you’re doing a backwards meeting for fun, but that’s another topic). In fact, it only makes sense to have them at the end. It’s had to give a wordmaster, ah counter or grammarian report when there’s still a significant amount of meeting time left. Speech evaluations would be split from the rest of the evaluation segment, but that would be inefficient and perplexing.

So evaluations are the third and final segment. That just leaves the question: table topics first or prepared speeches first? Surprisingly, some Toastmasters strongly favor having table topics first, although I’ve never once heard a specific, valid reason for why this should be.

Advantages of prepared speeches before table topics:

• Always prepared before impromptu. People who have rehearsed can’t relax and pay attention until they complete their part and stop fretting.
• Table topics are the most flexible part of the meeting... you can have one table topics speaker, three, five, ten, whatever. Logically you want it to be later in the meeting, so you know if you have spare time, or if you need to keep it short to make up time.
• Speech evaluators have a few minutes to think about their evaluations, instead of giving an evaluation immediately after seeing the speech.

Why would some people or clubs have table topics first? Thinking about it, I can only think of these reasons...

• Evaluators may be distracted, planning their evaluations, and not pay attention to table topics
• Your prepared speakers may be late and not have shown up to the meeting yet!