The First Meeting of 2025
Following the Christmas break, it was great to be back at Speakers Club and to have so many attendees. Some regulars, several returners, and four first-timers brought the total to 16.
To kick off the New Year, the focus of the session was Persuasion, which Ben aptly prepared and chaired.
Following the one-minute icebreaker on “Your favourite thing about Christmas,” the trusty Topic Wheel of Fortune on the iPad was called into action to disseminate the topics. Each person stood on stage, tapped the iPad to get their topic, and aimed to talk for two minutes, with Paul acting as timekeeper.
Many topics touched on a New Year’s Resolution theme, where speakers tried to persuade the audience that they should – take up a new hobby, start walking more, take up journalling or why they should visit a local tourist attraction.
Joe and Ben volunteered to evaluate the topics section and provided valuable positive feedback to each speaker, as well as suggestions for improvement.
The second topic session followed a similar format, but the speaker also took questions from the floor and convincingly responded.
Following a quick wrap-up, grammarian (word and phrase of the week) results and Um & Ah counts, speakers dispersed persuasively into the winter night, ready to return back to Wimbledon Library for the next session on Monday 27th January at 6.45pm.