Wedding Speeches Made Easy 

David Carle of Glasgow Toastmasters Club shares some thoughts on the art of speech-making.
Winston Churchill once said that the three most difficult things in life are to climb a wall that is leaning towards you; to kiss a girl who is leaning away from you; and to make a speech. I can’t help with the first two but, before you really start to worry about the specifics of what you’ll say, here are some general ideas for taking the fear out of preparing and delivering a wedding speech.

Content

Ideally, you should start gathering possible content for your speech long before the wedding day. Jot down any keywords, phrases, quotations and ideas as they come to you. Some people find that creating a mind map – a visual diagram using colours and images – is ideal for this.

Structure

Everyone knows a speech should have a beginning, middle and end, but it can be easy to forget the purpose of each.

• Firstly, think about how you can grab your listeners’ attention with a powerful or unusual opening.
• For the middle section, it’s advisable to have three to five points. Three is usually plenty – if you have too many, the audience will get distracted, and you may run over time.
• Finally, give some thought to how you will finish – perhaps with a call to action (“Ladies and gentlemen, please raise your glasses to the bride and groom”), or by referring back to the opening of your wedding speech.

One suggestion I'd recommend is to memorise your opening and closing, so you can give your full attention to your audience rather than looking at your notes.

Preparation

Allow yourself plenty of time – a good guideline is one hour of preparation time per minute of speaking time. This allows for writing, reading, reviewing, and practising. So to do justice to a six-minute speech could take six hours of preparation.
There’s a saying that a good speaker always writes their speech but never reads their speech. What this means is that you should:

• Write down your speech word for word. Add punctuation for pauses if this helps.
• Practise it out loud (in front of a mirror if you like - this can improve your gestures). I usually find that I trip over some parts, so have to rephrase them until I can say them without stumbling.
• Time yourself giving the wedding speech out loud, and allow a little extra time for audience reactions.
• If you use a word processor, check how many words you've used, then divide that by the number of words you speak out loud per minute. For example, if your document contains 850 words and you talk at about 100 words per minute, your speech will take about eight-and-a-half minutes. Remember that it's generally better to be a minute short than 3 minutes over time.
• It’s also a good idea at this stage to consider points in the speech where you would want to pause, use gestures, or introduce props.
• Check that your language is not repetitive; can you add impact to your speech by changing some phrases, or using ‘word pictures’? For example, rather than saying "It was a really hot day", you might try something like "the sky shimmered like hot oil in a frying pan".
• Once you’re happy with the sound of your speech, I’d suggest that you summarise it into keywords on a single page, or index cards, or a mind map.
• If you’re keen to reduce your use of notes, you could place them faced down in front of you; that way, you have them if you need them, but you probably won't use them.

In Summary

1. Keep a list of ideas to use as possible content.
2. Think about the structure: Beginning, Middle (three to five points) and Ending.
3. Make your start and ending powerful, and memorise them.
4. Preparation (If you have three months to plan a wedding speech, use this time!)
5. Make sure you clearly signal the end of your speech – just finish once.
6. As Dorothy Sarnoff once said: "Make sure you have finished speaking before your audience has finished listening.”

Good luck!