I gave my first PT at the tender age of 21 in 1971, it was supposed to be a 55 minute talk, I ran out of material early on, so got an audience discussion going, that went well, so did the fact that I finished almost 10 minutes short. It was from a Soc. outline.
Very soon I started writing my own outlines, I continued the audience discussion thing, and I always went way under time, when they were reduced to 45 minutes I never gave one that lasted more than 35.
I was never counseled for being too brief.
Eventually we were told not to ask audience questions, just to waffle.
A couple of C.O's mentioned to the B.O.E that the Soc. did not approve of bros. doing their own outlines, but the B.O.E told me I did such a good job to carry on. This came to an end when a letter actually banning personal outlines came from the WT.
I have heard of Congo's where a Bro. would sit there and vet how close the speaker stuck to the Soc's drivil,but I still used to knock the crap out of the outline, dropping whole sections sometimes, I had several Elders in other Congo's where I was visiting speaker say that they had given that talk, but did not recognise it when I gave it, apart from the title.
Yay , compliment ! That was because I never included a thought I could not back up by scripture, eventually I was finding it more and more difficult to choose an outline I could work with at all, so I stopped giving P.T's
I still got requests from other Congo's to go and speak there, these were passed on to me by the P.O and he wanted me to still go, even though I was not doing home talks, I refused the "privilege", because by this time I felt the P.T's were an anachronism that bored everyone s***less.
Even only 30 minutes of boredom was 30 minutes too long. (If I had ever given one of those it would have been about 23 minutes of course)
In 58 years as a JW I only ever heard a handful of talks I would rate as really good, and when you think that the C.O's have honed theirs for weeks before you hear it, that says a lot about the quality of P.T's in the Org. at least in my neck of the woods
