Blog Duck Soup, which promises to “dog paddle through culture, technology & music,” offers a weird & whacko take via writer Rachel Aviv’s participation in long-lived Toastmasters International, where she shares how “ordinary people (can) speak forcefully and authoritatively.” She offers:
I attended several sessions of a club in Brooklyn Heights with a reputation for particularly active members. The treasurer, Bruce Schaffer, clapped so loudly that he sat in the last row of chairs in the room so he wouldn’t hurt people’s ears. He told me (after politely inquiring whether he should speak in “short, Hemingway sentences or long, flowery, Kerouac ones” for the interview) that being a Toastmaster for the past eleven years had changed his personality and improved his law practice. “I start my day feeling stronger and more powerful,” he said. In the morning when he wakes up, he sometimes yells as loudly as he can into a towel.
