Table Topics is the impromptu speaking section of a Toastmasters club meeting, where members who do not have another meeting role get to speak. As is shown above, a good question for Table Topics is open ended, but not wide open. It should not be closed (able to be answered either yes or no). “What’s the worst street name you ever saw?” is open ended enough to be answered in just a minute or two. But “What is the meaning of life?” is a wide open question.
The worst name I saw decades ago was Stinking Creek Road. It is off Interstate 75 at Exit 144, about twenty miles south of Jellico, Tennessee (on the border with Kentucky). Imagine you were a realtor trying to sell a house on that road. You immediately would be asked about just how close it was to that smelly creek. Here in Idaho the Bureau of Land Management has a web page for the Poison Creek Picnic Site. It is on Mud Flat Road (another awful name), and not far from the small city of Grand View (a great name). I blogged about that picnic site in a July 25, 2017 post titled Answering questions about geographical names – the joy of impromptu speaking (Table Topics).
The October issue of Toastmaster magazine has an article by Silvana Clark on pages 24 and 25 titled Creative Tips for the Topicsmaster which lists four ideas. After reading it I have some additional ideas based on having written nearly three dozen posts in this blog.
Her first excellent idea, if a club is meeting online, is to ask members to take 30 seconds to find something in their house that has a special meaning for them. Then each member displays that item and explains its significance. In person you might instead what item you have in your wallet, purse, or pocket. On May 6, 2010 I blogged about What stories are you carrying in your pocket?
Silvana’s second idea is to Google some variation of “Untraditional Holidays” and ask people to describe how they would celebrate something like Big Bird’s Birthday (March 20th). A better way to accomplish this would be to visit or call your friendly local public library and ask the reference librarian to get you their copy of a book called Chase’s Calendar of Events. It lists days, weeks, and months. Every day celebrates several things, as was noted in a Pearls Before Swine cartoon back on August 24, 2016. I blogged about the book in a post on June 9, 2017 titled June is Effective Communications Month, but somehow I didn’t get the message.
Her third excellent idea is to make up titles and covers for twelve books and tell participants to pretend they are authors being interviewed on a talk show like Oprah.
Her fourth idea is to look up unusual laws online, and ask participants to discuss why one of them should be enforced. For example, on October 4, 2020 an article at KTVB7 discussed Did you know? Not smiling in Pocatello could have landed you in jail.
At the beginning of her article Silvana mentioned procrastinating till the night before a club meeting and just Googling a phrase like “Questions for Table Topics.” That is too narrow for finding excellent questions. They might instead be under other names like Icebreakers or Networking. There is an article by Claire Lew titled The 25 most popular icebreaker questions based on four years of data. There is another article at the Conversation Starters World web site with a list of 200 Icebreaker questions. At the Harvard Business Review there is an article by David Burkus on January 30, 2018 titled 8 Questions to ask someone other than “what do you do?”
There is a well-known list of 36 questions about getting to know someone better, which you can find in a Reader’s Digest article. On February 12, 2018 I blogged about them in a post titled Falling in love and Table Topics questions.
Most of us could not answer “What is the meaning of life?” in a two-minute Table Topic speech. But Alexander Papaderos managed to do it in about five minutes, beginning with a piece from a broken motorcycle mirror.
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