The Toastmaster is the meeting’s director and host. Taking on this role improves organisational skills, time management skills and public speaking skills. it is your role to ensure the smooth running of the meeting and to introduce speakers and work with the Timekeeper to keep the meeting running to schedule.

Being Grammarian is an exercise in improving your listening skills. You have two basic responsibilities: to comment on the positive and negative uses of English during the meeting.

The main purpose is to help the Speaker improve. Secondary purposes are to help everyone else in the audience improve, and to further hone your own public speaking skills. Otherwise you might as well just have a private chat with the Speaker afterwards.

The General Evaluator evaluates the conduct of the meeting, including the Toastmaster and all the evaluators.  The General Evaluator usually has 5-7 minutes to give the meeting evaluation, so it’s important to be prepared and organised.

Being Grammarian is also an exercise in improving your listening skills by counting the use of ‘crutches’ such as ‘um’ and ‘err’.

Table Topics are impromptu speeches. The purpose of the Table Topics section is to help members think on their feet and speak on a given subject for between one and two and a half minutes. The Table topics master must draw up the topics for the evening’s session.