What Are Suitable Subjects For Table Topics?
On Facebook Paul said that table topics were designed as a fun way to practise answering questions at a job interview.
I replied:
Do you have evidence for this? If so, the TMD could cite sources which would help the table topics master focus on work related subjects rather than asking people about fruit or colours or what animal they would like to be, which are amusing, maybe good for a one word ice-breaker, easy to answer and less stressful, but don't help you to search your memories for good things to say at interviews.
Sometimes the silly subjects produce good answers. For example, I recall a topics master who produced pieces of fruit and asked members of the audience to pick a piece and talk about it. My initial reaction was that this was not useful to real life.
However, she ran out of pieces of fruit and asked my husband who was a guest to talk about any fruit he liked. He talked about wines used to make grapes and how the sunny side of a hillside would produce different grapes which tasted and smelled different resulting in different wines. Informative and entertaining.
On another occasion I was asked about grapefruit and I talked about pink grapefruit, and got the story wrong. The moral is, that you need for table topics and life, a little book of facts about your favourite subjects so you can speak with authority on
1 your favourite book,
2 film,
3 country,
4 author,
5 fruit,
6 exercise,
7 sport,
8 game,
9 past job,
10 job you would like to have,
11 hero,
12 heroine.
It is also good to be able to speak on both sides of the question on a series of subjects such as
the advantages and disadvantages of
1 Political questions
2 Religious questions
One way to put both sides is to start geographically with another country's point of view and finish with your country's point of view.
Another way is historically, for example, before the cave dwellers moved to cities, before Abraham, before the Greeks, before the Romans, before ... Jesus (B.C.); before Mohammed, before WW2, before Hitler came to power, before Covid-19; before the Welfare state, before I started working as ... studied ... married ... had children ... retired ... . before abortion was made legal, before the death penalty was abolished, before corporal punishment was banned, before we joined/left the Common Market, the gold standard, became landlords, tenants, went to work for ... became a delivery driver, went to prison, went to hospital, dealt with rude members of staff, dealt with rude customers, received a surprise gift ... However, after ... now that I/ we have seen ...
Also it helps to be able to divert a controversial question with humour.
Another person asks how to find table topics for the word Thesaurus. Look up the meaning of thesaurus and it is a store of treasures. Pick the word treasure.
Find quotations on treasure. Our children are our greatest treasure, pops up in Goodreads.
I looked in my own book, Quick Quotations, which I am revising and updating. I don't have the words treasure, nor words. I must add words are given to us to hide our thoughts.
To sum up
1 Use your dictionary
2 Use a thesaurus
3 Look at both sides of the question
4 Look at geography
5 Look at history
6 See my book Quick Quotations.
Please send me any favourite quotations you would like me to include in my next compilation.
Useful Websites
https://www.toastmasters.org/magazine/magazine-issues/2018/dec2018/14-how-to
https://www.toastmasters.org/magazine/magazine-issues/2017/july2017/tabletopics
https://files.meetup.com/14476192/Sample%20Table%20Topics%20Questions.pdf
About the Author
Angela Lansbury is teacher of English. (Advanced English and English as a Second Language or English as a Foreign Language, French and other languages, an aspiring polyglot.)
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