Can death and drugs be funny?
That was my question as I created a tall tales speech for a recent Toastmasters Tall Tale Contest. Tall Tales Contest speeches are 3-5 minute speeches in which the subject “must be of a highly exaggerated, improbable nature and have a theme or plot.”
My Tall Tales speech (video below), “Perfect. Just Perfect” starts out with a true story of something I did in my garage years ago and then veers off, taking a serious subject into a humorous (and not true) story. This is a recording of the speech during an area contest and was the first time I gave the speech in front of an audience (although giving a speech on Zoom when everyone has their cameras off, and you don’t hear or see audience reactions is a little like practicing alone). I won, and compete again at the Division contest on 11/5.
I also uploaded the video to my Yoodli account, which gave me a transcript, and some speech analytics. One of the areas Yoodli suggested could be improved was pacing. In the “delivery” section of the analytics, I saw that I had an average pace of 111 words per minute, which is a bit slower than a conversational pace. I also saw a graph that showed how my pace varied over the course of the speech. And, I had the option to playback the speech at 1.25X speed. I did that and came to the conclusion that for this speech, I could speed it up just a bit (but not 1.25X). Speeding up a speech can increase the level of excitement, as long as you still have pace variation and pauses. Take a look at Diane’s Speech Yoodli Analytics (you can even leave comments!)
