San­dra Lutch­man of Dy­nam­ic Speak­ers Club emerged the win­ner of the Hu­mor­ous Speech seg­ment at the Area 12 Toast­mas­ters staged a Hu­mor­ous Speech and Eval­u­a­tion con­test at the El Do­ra­do East Sec­ondary School.

Lutch­man, who holds the dis­tinc­tion of be­ing the sec­ond fe­male to be­come a cer­ti­fied pi­lot in Trinidad & To­ba­go, com­mand­ed the at­ten­tion of the au­di­ence with her piece on ag­ing grace­ful­ly. Sec­ond place went to Lennox Sealy of Nepuyo Toast­mas­ters Club of Ari­ma. The crowd erupt­ed dur­ing Sealy's talk on cre­ativ­i­ty when he asked, "Just imag­ine what I could do with three hands and three feet?" The con­test brought the top two con­tes­tants from the three club lev­el events to the Samuel Ra­moutar Hall. Ac­cord­ing to a me­dia re­lease from the Area 12 Toast­mas­ters, the use of hu­mour in speech­es is a core learn­ing ob­jec­tive in the Toast­mas­ters Ed­u­ca­tion­al pro­gramme. Like the myth­i­cal city of El Do­ra­do, work­ing one's way to hu­mour is of­ten eas­i­er to en­vis­age than to re­alise up­on de­liv­ery of the speech.

De­spite this dif­fi­cul­ty, whether a toast­mas­ter's ul­ti­mate aim is to orate for en­ter­tain­ment or to im­prove pre­sen­ta­tions at work, they be­come "mas­ters of the laugh" by em­ploy­ing sev­er­al speak­ing tools and tech­niques. In the eval­u­a­tion con­test, four con­tenders and the au­di­ence lis­tened to a sam­ple speech de­liv­ered by toast­mas­ter Nan­coo of Nepuyo Toast­mas­ters ti­tled "Who am I?" Af­ter a short pe­ri­od of prepa­ra­tion each con­tes­tant gave an eval­u­a­tion of the speech. An­oth­er hall­mark of Toast­mas­ters Ed­u­ca­tion is the abil­i­ty to pro­vide feed­back. Ef­fec­tive eval­u­a­tion con­sid­ers the val­ue of the speech, its pos­i­tive as­pects and pro­vides con­struc­tive sug­ges­tions for the de­vel­op­ment and im­prove­ment of the speak­er. Ja­son Cot­ton of Nepuyo Toast­mas­ters Club was cho­sen as the Best Eval­u­a­tor and Stacey Fos­ter of Talk Tsu Toast­mas­ters Club placed sec­ond.

Cot­ton, an econ­o­mist with Cen­tral Bank, is no stranger to win­ning speech con­tests. In 2011, he placed sec­ond in the Toast­mas­ters Caribbean Speech Con­test. The four out­stand­ing speak­ers will rep­re­sent Area 12 at the Ter­ri­to­ry com­pe­ti­tion on Sat­ur­day, Sep­tem­ber 29 when they face the win­ners of Area 13, the oth­er clus­ter of clubs in T&T. The win­ning speak­ers at that event will ad­vance to the dis­trict-lev­el com­pe­ti­tion next month which will be held in Grena­da dur­ing the Dis­trict 81 Con­fer­ence. For bi­ogra­phies of the Area 12 win­ners, de­tails for the up­com­ing con­tests in­clud­ing the Dis­trict Con­fer­ence in Grena­da and lo­ca­tion/meet­ing times of Area 12 Toast­mas­ters clubs in T&T vis­it www.area12toast­mas­ters.word­press.com or join the con­ver­sa­tion on Twit­ter @A12D81Toast