How to Deliver a Rock Solid Speech Evaluation

Giving constructive feedback to aspiring public speakers

If you’re a member of a public speaking organization like Toastmasters, then you’ll be familiar with the idea of giving a speech evaluation. The goals of speech evaluation is to identify what the speaker is doing well, and identify opportunities for the speaker to make improvements in their public speaking skill set. A really good speech evaluation won’t just give the speaker ideas for improvement, it will also help bolster or maintain the speaker’s self-esteem, making them feel good about the process and excited about the prospect of giving their next speech.

So how do we go about delivering a rock solid speech evaluation? Start with the following:

Know the Speech Objectives Inside and Out Before Evaluating — Assuming it’s a Toastmasters speech, read the project outline and evaluation guidelines carefully and ask the speaker if there is anything specific that they would like you to focus on in your evaluation.

Know Your Speaker — Every speaker is different. Many new speakers and even some experienced speakers will need the emphasis to be on building up their confidence. For other more confident and experienced speakers, they will benefit from greater emphasis on the nuts and bolts of their speech.

Put Your Attention Completely on the Speaker — It’s hard to effectively evaluate someone when you are not giving them 100% of your attention. The person being evaluated will also have a harder time taking your evaluation seriously if you are perceived to be distracted while they are presenting.

Restate the Objectives Clearly — This helps focus the attention of the audience and the speaker on your criteria, and gives your comments a clearer context, making them more useful. If the criteria is large, narrow in on what is most important.

Display Sincerity — Ever been the recipient of a white wash evaluation? How useful did it feel? Even if there were a few helpful pieces of advice included in this sort of evaluation, their value is lost or diminished because the evaluator’s credibility was not evident.

Watch Your Tone — Unless you know someone well, always err on the side of being a tiny bit too gentle rather than a touch too harsh. Someone may appear brave and jovial on the outside, but on the inside still feel like they are being evaluated as a person.

Open Face or Close Face — Most toastmasters are familiar with the sandwich technique of constructive criticism sandwiched between positive comments. For more experienced speakers, an open faced sandwich technique may be appropriate (emphasis on constructive criticism). Usually the speaker will tell you in advance to ‘focus on where I can improve.’ In this sort of case, I will often oblige, but I’ll also be sure to let the audience know that I will be conducting my evaluation in this manner and the reason why.

4 to 1 — If you’ve ever been in a job review process where you are providing feedback to a co-worker or employee, you’ll know that people tend to hear more of the negative than the positive. Even if the majority of feedback is positive, the negative can assume greater weight and the overall review can be perceived as a negative one by the recipient. With this in mind, strive to achieve a ratio of 4 positive comments for every negative one.

Limit Your Constructive Criticism — Pick only a very few things for the speaker to improve upon. Consider what is most important or what would most improve future speeches. Never give your speaker a laundry list of things to improve on. It’s not helpful, can overwhelm some speakers, and the most important feedback can get lost in the clutter.

Third Person — This can be a helpful technique for making constructive feedback feel less personal and also allowing the audience at large to benefit from the feedback.

Avoid praising the person, praise the skill or technique. Comments like “Sue is always amazing when she speaks” don’t actually help Sue, and they also deflate other speakers who don’t get put on the same pedestal as Sue. Say instead, “Sue displays great vocal variety.”

Be specific — If you are going to talk about Sue’s vocal variety, give concrete examples of what worked, what didn’t work, and a clear example of how it might be improved.

Finish Strong and Avoid Cliché — End on one or more of the speaker’s strengths, and if you can help it, please avoid saying “And we look forward to hearing Sue’s next speech…” If this sounds picky, I’d suggest that an effective evaluation needs to be a sincere and personal sharing of ideas, and ending with a canned statement tends to blunt your efforts.

Display Tact — Oddly, I find tact to be more a function of the evaluator’s experience than of their overall kindness. Sometimes it is hard for us to articulate something to be improved and we wind up stumbling and sounding more negative then we mean to. If this happens, don’t beat yourself up, but be sure to seek the speaker out afterwards and let them know that your intentions were not to be harsh. Being an effective evaluator is a learning process and it takes time to be able to learn to be clear, succinct, precise and tactful.

At the end of the day, speech evaluation can be just as much an art as public speaking, and we can take our evaluation skills much further than what we've discussed here. But at the end of the day, the most important thing to remember is that a good evaluation does 2 things — It gives the speaker something to work on, and it gives the speaker the fuel he or she needs to come back and deliver their next speech.