jane chin

I'm competing in our area's Toastmaster's speech contest later this month, and practiced my competition speech in our club meeting yesterday.

As we were going through round robin evaluations, the topic came up about my speech, and I said that it was a true story.

Then people said, "this was a true story? wow now I like the speech even better!"

I said, "what?! aren't all international speech competition speeches supposed to be true stories?"

The club president said, "the speech needs to be original, doesn't have to be true."

I was flabbergasted. I'd still give competition speeches that are true, though. Only with tall tales or humorous speech would I make creative liberties.