I came second in my club evaluation contest last night, which I'm fairly stoked about as the club has some really good evaluators. I was second contestant so I got to hear most of my competitors' evaluations too.

I didn't do anything that unusual in the praise line, compared to the other contestants, but in the recommendation section I talked about the speech structure. The speech was titled "You can change your life" and the opening lines were about that but the content was telling a very compelling personal story about how the contestant had changed her life.

My suggestion was that she decide whether she really wanted to tell her story or if she wanted to advise others to change their lives. If she wanted to tell her story, I then said, she could change the title and use the challenge "You can change your life" at the end. If she wanted to advise others, I recommended focusing more on the advice with using her story as an illustration of the points. Either way, I thought and said, she had the material there for a compelling speech.

I got some feedback post-contest from a couple of other club members, which was useful, but also a DTM visiting from another club came up to me and suggested the improvement of criticising the speech she gave, not the speech I thought she should give.

That puzzles me. I suggested two versions because I don't know exactly what her objectives were with the speech. All the other praise and recommendations I gave could work with any speech structure (she had a great sense of humour, great turns of phrase, lovely body language, but kept forgetting her speech and pausing to study her notes, I suggested she try using bullet points instead.)

Any ideas? Is there a way of making it clear when I give advice about structure I'm outlining options of how it could work. I quite often comment on someone's structure in that form when doing Toastmasters evaluations as the best structure for a speech depends on what precisely your objectives are, or I'm not sure myself what structure would be best and personally I'd practice the speech both ways to see what worked best.)