The Speakers Club (ASC) national Conference Glasgow 2014

Delegates arrive - View of floor 0 from floor 1 Radisson blu hotel

On the bus on the first evening on the way
to the Glasgow City  Chambers

This weekend I attended the Association of Speakers' Clubs' national conference in Glasgow (you may remember my post about the national conference at York in 2010 )


(Here is a link to the ASC website that has lots of resources and info, and here to Craven Speakers Club)


At the conference I was surprised  to find how many people have belonged to the ASC for many, many years -- until I realised I was no longer a newbie myself... Indeed, the date at the bottom of the Craven Speakers Club website reveals I have been a member for nine years now.

I looked at my own copy of the ASC manual -- and discovered the evaluation of my first speech was January 2005 - thank you Mavis for doing this - and thank you other people for writing up later evaluations. It does show I have improved. I don't look down at my feet any more (I hope)

In the Glasgow Civic Chambers watching
the Topics Competition

And ("phew") - I finally attempted my "masterpiece" (the level 10 speech) last month and passed.. So I just got it in before the end of my tenth year. (It was entitled "Falling in love with lichens", and I was evaluated and assessed for it at Bradford Speakers Club, having used the same speech in our speech competition the previous week at Skipton)


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Well, back to the conference:

We were based at the Radisson Blu hotel.  But on the first evening we went to a reception at Glasgow City Chambers and watched the topics competition.

 The Topic given for the Impromptu speech was "Spring is in the air"

 The Runner up was Clive Dawson from our Eastern Region (of which Craven Speakers  Club is part). He led the topic round to leaving wild parts in your garden for nature - which was a good call to action.

Clive and his trophy and certificate

The reception

A selfie at the Galsgow City Chambers Ladies' rest room

Saturday morning was the AGM.

The 2014 ASC AGM

The 2014 ASC AGM

A group of us went to lunch at the travel agent next door - who were busy promoting a cruise

In the afternoon we had a seminar on development and publicity about the ASC.

Sue who organised it had expected 30 and was very pleased with the large number that turned up.

I brought some photocopies of my article Twenty Top Tips for Successful Publicity Posters and some posters for our club and the Table top sale on 10 May in Skipton.

Seminar

In the evening there was a Meal

Demonstration of Scottish Highland Dancing before the ASE Meal on 26 April at Radisson Blu hotel

The highlight for me was the Evaluations Competition.

 A gentleman gave an 8 minute speech "25 years of the internet" _ A really good summary I thought to getting up to date and to looking back back on the 25th Anniversary of the start of the World Wide Web.

Then eight people, the winners from each of the 8 Regions in Britain each had to evaluate the speech. (Without seeing what the other people did)
The speech was a level 6 speech - being assessed for "Vocabulary and word pictures"
But I thought it was not a suitable speech for doing a word pictures talk  There are so many long words involved in describing the computing - html  (hypertext markup language) http, etc, that to add other descriptive  and emotional phrases would have made it too complicated.


The evaluations varied - The first two people passed the speech and praised  the extremely few (well I though one actually) word picture /simile that he gave -(that  Tim Berners-Lee  finding and sorting files was a bit like playing the game Happy Families.)


The following speakers were more critical and several suggested that he repeat the exercise using a different topic. They also tried to give illustrations of how he could use more vivid language.


I enjoyed watching how the different evaluators approached the topic. I was glad to see also that experienced evaluators could come up with different ideas about whether a speaker should move on to the next speech or not.

A quick reminder of the grand City Chambers