You're a Toastmaster who's about finished with your CC and wondering which two manuals to order for your next projects. Sometimes it's hard to tell much from the sketchy description TMI has online, and oddly, there doesn't seem to be much discussion of them on the web.
If you search, you can eventually find a list of the projects involved in each manual (the best I can find right now is this page from District 1 and this District 19 page). But that still doesn't tell you how well written or relevant the projects are, or -- most important -- are they helpful? And are they fun?
So here are my own biased opinions of the manuals I've seen.
I found the "basic manual" quite useful. I tend to scorn beginner-oriented stuff and usually prefer to skip ahead, but in this case I found all of the basic manual projects useful and the descriptions helpful. Naturally, I needed a lot of help in some areas and only a little in others, but all ten projects taught me something I needed to learn, while leaving lots of latitude for me to choose any topic I liked.
I'm planning to go back and run through the basic manual again -- its projects apply to advanced speakers as well as beginning ones.
The Basic manual gently steers you in the direction of The Entertaining Speaker as one of your next two choices by giving a copy of its first project. It's a good choice; these five projects teach skills that nearly everyone needs to learn (I certainly did) while offering plenty of flexibility to talk about pretty much anything you like.
Nearly all of my public speaking outside of Toastmasters is on technical topics (computing, math or physical science) so I knew I wanted either this or the Technical Presentations manual. I'm glad I chose Speaking to Inform first. Its projects give you a lot of latitude while still teaching lots of useful skills. I had a lot of fun preparing these speeches.
My favorite manual! Continuing with my "one light-hearted, one serious" theme, I chose Storytelling for my third advanced manual. I loved it. This is by far the most fun of all the Toastmaster manuals I've used, and I want to go back through the manual a second time just for fun. But it wasn't just fun -- I learned a lot and got to practice some important skills. Highly recommended.
The final project (Bringing History to Life) is difficult. It's very hard to find the right story, something with both character and plot development that fits into a speech of this length. Everyone I've talked to seems to have just as much trouble with it as I had. But don't give in to the temptation to cheat and do something that doesn't quite meet the goals. I tried four or five ideas, writing most of a speech each time, before I found one that really worked as an interesting 10-minute speech. The process of discovering why the others didn't work was just as important as the speech I ended up giving. The extra work wasn't wasted ... and I learned a lot about several interesting historical figures.
I give mostly technical talks. So this manual should be right up my alley, better than the more general Speaking to Inform ... right?. But it's actually a lot harder, because the projects are much more specific and don't always allow a lot of latitude. I still got to practice valuable skills, but it was sometimes frustrating trying to bend these exercises into something that would help me. Also, two of the five projects are annoying impediments: the Sales talk had no relevance to anything I care about learning, while the Team Technical Presentation mostly measures your ability to corral other people into doing stuff for you.
I thought this would be like the Entertaining book, only more fun. Not so. The projects are so detailed that finding a topic that lets me meet the very specific requirements of each project (e.g. start with a self-deprecating joke, end with a funny story, and in between have two or three sets of several related jokes each -- all in 5-7 minutes!) turned out to be quite challenging and sometimes not a lot of fun. Also, the example jokes in the book aren't very funny and don't apply very well to real-world speeches. I guess the lesson I took away from this book was: being funny is hard work!
I was so tempted to order Interpretive Reading instead. But I'm doing a lot of conference speaking now, and this book promised skills I know I need.
Unfortunately, this manual is by far the worst written I've encountered yet. The projects are ill-specified, full of touchy-feely jargon, and they lack any clear understandable goals for either the speaker or the evaluator. Do I regret choosing it? Grudgingly, I'll say no, because the projects themselves are still skills I needed to learn. Just don't take the instructions too seriously, and make sure your evaluator knows what you care about, as opposed to the book's incomprehensible check-lists (actual question: "Did the speaker use appropriate humor to create a lightness of spirit in meeting audience expectations?")
Also: another sales project. What is it with Toastmasters thinking we're all sales people?
Here are some manuals I haven't used, but have seen or discussed with other Toastmasters members. If you have a manual you'd like me to list here, let me know -- I'm happy to add comments from other people.
This will be my next manual, and I am really looking forward to it. I can't speak to how well the projects are written, because I don't have the manual yet, but they look like so much fun when other club members present them. I'm confident I'll enjoy it, and will learn better control of my voice and delivery in the process.
I haven't seen this book yet, but a fellow club member recommended it very highly and has me persuaded to try it. She particularly liked the way the projects included unpredictable events (for instance, responding to something club members might say in a discussion) so it helped her learn how to run an event that isn't fully scripted and rehearsed. The only difficulty was that the projects take a lot of time and can't easily be cut shorter, which can be difficult to fit into a typical 2-speaker club meeting.
I don't do television, but I ordered this manual because I thought some of the skills mentioned in the project titles -- interviewing, commentary -- would be useful. But once I actually had the manual in hand, I discovered that these aren't solo projects: most of them require a teammate who's working through the same manual. For example, you have to be both interviewer and interviewee (two separate projects), so you interview them for one project, they interview you for the other. It sounds like it would be fun to do if you can talk a friend into doing it with you.
Everybody needs to learn persuasive speaking techniques, right? Even if you mostly give technical talks, you may want to argue for your point, or advocate a particular type of technology. But take a look at the titles of this manual's projects. The first two are purely sales techniques. The other three might be more useful, but I hate to order a manual where 40% of the projects strike me as annoying and irrelevant to my needs.
I don't often need to give this sort of speech (toast, roast, presenting/accepting awards) so I don't have much interest in this manual myself. But I've watched several other people work through it and they seem to enjoy it well enough. It's my impression that the projects don't usually fit very well into a Toastmasters context, but you could make the same argument about the "Professional" manual. If you need these skills, you can make them fit. Many of them are very short (3 min).