Having done plenty of evaluations over the last ten years, you would think I am a master when it comes to doing that.  Well it turns out that I need to make some improvements.  And I hope to get my act together by the Northwest 4 Area Evaluation Contest on October 8th in which I’ll represent the Arlington Heights club.

As the Arlington Heights club did not have an Evaluation contest due to no one there stepping up to compete, I volunteer to represent them in the Area Contest as I’d like to give the contest another try – the only other time I competed in that contest was in 2003 and I couldn’t even get past the club contest!  After I volunteered late last month, I had a couple of evaluation opportunities at the North Suburban club this month, including tonight’s club contest (members in more than one club can compete in more than one club contest but only in one Area Contest).  I realized both times that I have one primary problem when giving evaluations – I tend to say some of the same things over again as I worried about not having much to say.  Usually when I write some notes for an evaluation, I’ll put down up to three good points about the speech and up to three areas of improvement.  So during my time giving the evaluation, I ended up repeating some of my comments about what is great about the speech and perhaps repeat an area of improvement.  As a result, the two evaluations took more than three minutes, the first ended up approaching four minutes, which would result in a disqualification if it was a contest.

So my challenges now on giving evaluations would be to state my points about the speech without repeating them and no summarizing the speech apart from the start and end of my evaluations.  Chances are that should be enough to give a two-minute evaluation as I normally don’t speak fast so I should no longer worry about speaking too little.  I have two more opportunities to give evaluations prior to the Area Contest, one next week at Arlington Heights and one the following week at North Suburban, so I can not only be better prepared for the Area Contest but be a better evaluator in general.