Does Toastmasters Actually Help?

Toastmasters is an organization that claims to help people with public speaking. Thus the name, as in “Master of the Toast.” They have a standard curriculum, regional groups with weekly meetings, periodic public speaking competitions, and standards for critiquing speeches. In a typical meeting, a person might give a prepared speech and then accept commentary/criticism from the other Toastmasters. There are also short, informal speeches that give people an opportunity to ad lib.

I’m curious if Toastmasters actually helps people become better speakers at all. I know several people who are very active in the program who have not necessarily become better speakers.  I was working on a video presentation with one such person recently. Everyone on this project had a speaking part for the video. I nailed mine on the first take, whereas the Toastmaster required several takes.  Maybe he simply held himself to a higher standard, because he was a Toastmaster? No, he repeatedly made obvious slip-ups on each take. Mine didn’t have any obvious slip-ups. Another person on this project nailed his take on the first try, and a fourth person slipped up and required several takes. On this admittedly small sample, I saw no obvious benefit from Toastmasters. If it's supposed to transform you into a perfectly polished speaker, it failed this person. 

Another active Toastmaster has long, awkward pauses in every one of her presentations. She doesn’t know how to restart after being interrupted. Another tries really hard to be humorous, but this always falls flat. I recently saw this person give a somewhat technical hour-long talk in which they lost everybody in the first five minutes without ever getting them back. Another Toastmaster I’ve seen flounder in various “technical review” meetings (reviewing some kind of complicated actuarial methodology). No amount of public speaking polish will smooth over the fact that you’re struggling to understand the material.

I can see how it might help. Practice is bound to make you better at anything. If you’re paralyzed by the fear of public speaking, Toastmasters can provide you with a safe environment to practice in. I knew someone who spoke English as her second language who joined Toastmasters to improve her deficiencies with English. As far as I can tell, it helped. But overall I’m still skeptical, because I’ve seen too many cases of failure. Maybe a thorough randomized trial, with a “real Toastmasters curriculum” and a “placebo Toastmasters curriculum” would prove that Toastmasters is really awesome and my anecdotes are bullshit. Or maybe mere practice makes you better; perhaps the various Toastmasters checklists and rules for good speaking have nothing to do with it.

Here’s what I think: you need to learn your subject matter. Learn it really, really well. Know it forwards and backwards. Find out where people are discussing and debating it (comment forums, debates on Youtube, dueling scholarly articles, etc.) so you can see where you might get push-back. Figure out when and where people have difficulty understanding it, and practice discussing it with a newbie. Anticipate someone learning it “the wrong way,” show them how the wrong way leads to something obviously wrong, and how “the right way” leads them to something obviously right. 

Here’s something that Steven Landsburg has said about writing, but I think it applies equally well to speaking (from The Big Questions):

The bane of a college professor’s existence is the student who has been taught in a writing course that there is such a thing as good writing, independent of having something to say. Students turn in well-organized grammatically correct prose, with the occasional stylistic flourish in lieu of any logical argument, and don’t understand why they’ve earned grades of zero.
In the other direction, if your writing is murky, it’s usually because your thinking is murky, too. The cure for that is not a series of writing exercises; it’s to master your subject matter.
In my decades of writing for magazines and newspapers, I’ve written some pretty strong columns and some pretty weak ones. In nearly every case, the weak ones were weak because I hadn’t nailed down the logical structure of my argument. A good column comes, almost always, from translating a logical argument into mathematics, filling a pad of paper with calculations to ensure that the argument is solid, burning the mathematics, and translating my understanding into prose. The translation to prose is the easy part. Prose flows easily when you understand what you’re saying. If you’re struggling to “craft” your prose, you’re probably confused.
So I generally advise college students to avoid the English department. If you like to read, read. You don’t need to take classes. Grateful as I am that Professor N., the fact remains that if I hadn’t spent so much of my adult life rereading Richard III, I’d have been reading and rereading something else, maybe not quite as good, but who knows? And if you don’t like to read, play tennis or something instead. One hobby is as good as another.
If you want to take a literature course or two, I won’t begrudge you; just don’t let them get in the way of your education. But for God’s sake, avoid the writing courses. If you want to write, spend a couple of years studying, say, cognitive science. Take an idea that fascinates you, spend a lot of time thinking hard about the fine structure of the idea, and then explain it to your friends. You won’t have trouble finding words. Now put those words down on paper.

Know your subject matter really, really well, have a little bit of empathy for the uninitiated and their typical pitfalls, and the speaking (or writing) will almost take care of itself. There may be cases where sheer charisma or crowd-working skills will save you from your ignorance. But you have to stop and ask yourself, Do I really want it that way?