About Brinker Toastmasters

Brinker Toastmasters is a member of Toastmasters International, the world’s largest nonprofit educational organization dedicated to helping men and women become more effective listeners, leaders, and speakers. We have been active in Vienna, Virginia, since 1998. Please use the links on this page to learn more about us and local Toastmasters organizations.

We meet at Navy Federal Credit Union, 820 Follin Lane, in Vienna, VA on the second and fourth Saturday of every month. (For exact directions to our meeting room see We’re Moving Again.) Our meetings begin at 9:30 am and last about two hours. Guests are always welcome.

Take a look at this video to see how Toastmasters works; then use the form below to contact us to ask for more information about our club.

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Words Matter

Like it or not, words matter when you are president. They are a president’s strongest weapon. With them, he or she can move nations and shift debates. Words can inspire trust between hostile leaders, such as the trust between Reagan and his Soviet adversary Mikhail Gorbachev. With words, a president can move mountains and change the world.

Henry Olsen at The Washington Post

The importance and the power of words is not limited to Presidents. Remember what a remarkable tool you have at your disposal. Use it responsibly. Use it well.

The Grammarian’s Office

At Brain Pickings, Maria Popova writes on Iris Murdoch and Existentialists and Mystics. One of Murdoch’s paragraphs shows us what we should all be aiming for as grammarians and speakers—

We must not be tempted to leave lucidity and exactness to the scientist. Whenever we write we ought to write as well as we can… in order to defend our language and render subtle and clear that stuff which is the deepest texture of our spirit.

Story Corps has a challenge for you

Share your stories and memories of loved ones with us. ❤️🧡💛💚💙💜 #TalkingTuesday pic.twitter.com/B3b9m47vQp

— StoryCorps (@StoryCorps) February 12, 2019

National Week of Conversation

National Week of Conversation 2019 is April 5-13! Living Room Conversations is excited to partner with @USConvoProject to host several online conversations you can join from anywhere with a computer. Host, join, and #ListenFirst to understand! https://t.co/DUxJxz07ta pic.twitter.com/yCZBuMTF43

— Living Rm Convos (@LivingRoomConvo) February 11, 2019

“Online conversations” sounds a little strange, but this effort sounds like a natural fit for Toastmasters.

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The Civil Conversations Project has a new home at the center of the reimagined https://t.co/tpB95fL5N1. It's also where you'll find a refreshed version of the Better Conversations Guide.

Print it, share it, and let us know how you're using it. https://t.co/79dlSg1upJ pic.twitter.com/BE0zAAhia3

— The On Being Project (@onbeing) February 12, 2019

About an hour after I saw the post from Living Room Conversations, the On Being Project offered a guide to better conversations.

Wise Words

B. C. Dreyer, about whom we first wrote last week, speaks for himself at The Washington Post today. Here’s the big takeaway for me:

What’s left is more important than so-called good English: effective English. English that clearly, strongly and unambiguously — unless you’ve a penchant for ambiguity — conveys from writers’ brains through their typing fingers and onward to the imaginations of their readers what it is that writers are attempting to communicate.

Whether you enjoy serving as grammarian or are frustrated by it, this is an article look at.

When calendars and Twitter collide

Because sometimes a pizza bagel is the only thing that will help https://t.co/5ipG5oHmGS

— Washingtonian (@washingtonian) February 8, 2019

You’re welcome!

(Seriously, would be grateful for intelligence on that first entry at the link, Call Your Mother.)

Grammarians, beware

I caught sight of Benjamin Dreyer in a Twitter post a few days ago but decided to let the link to a New Yorker article go. (It was close. There were references to Strunk and White, George Orwell, and David Foster Wallace. And there was the intelligence that Dreyer’s book “seems happily aware of its own planned obsolescence.”) But today comes the discovery that Dreyer and his book are right there on the front of the New York Times web site: Meet the Guardian of Grammar Who Wants to Help You Be a Better Writer. See if you find the articles as entertaining as I did, and see if you find anything that will help you be a better speaker. Or grammarian. Me? I’ve added @BCDreyer to my Twitter feed.