In the second year of public speaking our speeches got longer and more ambitious. The teacher invited other groups to come in and we would have discussions on all sorts of topics. What would you say about cutlery for instance? She taught us how to chair meetings and debates although she still didn’t approve of them. All the time she was pushing the boundaries of what we knew and how we should express it. We met groups from Toastmasters and the local seminary and it was good for us to meet public speakers who had been taught differently, and we truly believed, not as well. All this was in preparation for our first official public speaking exam.

That night there were adjudicators in our classroom and we all gave our prepared speeches and, quivering, waited for them to give us an impromptu subject. Mine was “Spies� and to this day I don’t know what I said but I know James Bond did come into it. We were given marks for content, tone, diction speed and variety. We had to wait a few months for our results but it was quite interesting to see the comments of the various adjudicators about our chosen topics and our performances in general. My chosen topic was public speaking itself and I finished with a poem about it and evidently the adjudicators liked it because I got first class honours. Finally, the fact that I was a writer had paid off!

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