Theme Camouflage:Role Ah counter

'When in Rome, do as the Romans do'

Concealing the hidden virtues and vices,

To camouflage the society's biases.

Adapting in order to become one with the crowd,

Instead of being the one around

Do you lose yourself in the quest of acceptance and adjustment or stand out and shine?

A ninja using smoke screen or a piece of cloth alike the wall to hide behind, as a child fascinated us. Concealing our abilities and focusing on just studies has been most part of my school days. We loved sports more than studying but that part washed-out in race to score good marks. Extra curriculum was always extra in our education system and never prioritized. As a grown up, we aspire many things at a time and miss opportunity. Famous quote by Thomas Edison says “Opportunity is missed by most people, because it is dressed in overalls & looks like work.” 

Good Evening Fellow TM and dear guest

Camouflage has been always around us, also in our speech. there are many hidden elements which makes audience distract and prevents them from paying attention. Here comes my role as an Ah counter  in today’s meet, I will be monitoring the usage of Ahs, crutch words, filler patterns and unintentional pauses, both long and short. I’ll be keeping a record of the Ahs which are sounds like Ah, Um, Err, Hmm etc. Crutch words and filler patterns are words used to fill our thought process and include words such as ‘you know’, ‘I mean’, ‘actually’, ‘like’.A short pause is a pause up to 3 seconds and a long pause, over 3 seconds. So let’s try to have pauses as rightly-timed as possible and aim to minimize the use of unintended pauses, Ahs and filler words in our speech.

I will be presenting my report when the general evaluator calls for the report and would also be mentioning the perfect articulator of the day.

A perfect Articulator is the person who would be using minimum ah counts and filler words. Best of luck to the all speakers.

<<Handing over control>>

Over to  Toastmaster XYZ.

<<Report >>

I have divided my report into 3 sections.

-               People who have used less than or equal to 5 ah counts and crutch words.

Mention people name [ eg. Tm Ravi, TM Prachi, TM xyz ]

-               People who have used more than 5 ah counts and crutch words.

[ Don’t tell the names.

Just say the rest of the people have used more than 5 ah counts. I encourage them to use less crutch and ahs in their upcoming meetings.

]

-               Name of perfect articulator.

[ You can choose what according to the report and you the best articulator was in the meeting. ]