To create a memorable wedding speech requires excitement, empathy, warmth, enthusiasm and flair. Flair is the sizzle in the sausage

Having something worthwhile to say is never enough. You need to know how to use words and images to reach your audience’s minds and hearts. Your speech needs a touch of flair. Flair is partly intuition – which comes from experience, imagination and a willingness to think – and a careful study of this chapter!

Every communication is an opportunity to throw a bridge across a void. If you can do this, your speech will have more effect than you could ever have believed possible. When we face an important interview, we prepare ourselves to make the best possible impression. We look good. So, if we are about to meet an audience, we should polish our words as well as our shoes. We should sound good.

Today people’s expectations are high and their attention spans are low. Merely to gain and hold an audience’s attention requires flair. If you want to keep them interested, your speech must sparkle. So let’s get polishing.

1 Preparing your script

The best talkers are those who are most natural. They are easy, fluent, friendly and amusing. No script for them. How could there be? They are talking only to us and basing what they say on our reactions as they go along. For most of us, however, that sort of performance is an aspiration rather than a description. Our tongues are not so honeyed and our words are less winged. We need a script.

But what sort of script? Cards? Notes? Speech written out in full? It’s up to you. There is no right way of doing it. Here is a simple method favoured by many speakers:

• Write the speech out in full
• Memorise the opening and closing lines and familiarise yourself with the remainder of the speech.
• Summarise the speech on one card or one sheet of paper using key words to remind you of your sequence of anecdotes, quotations, jokes and so on.

2 Using words to be said, not read

Most people can write something to be read, few can write something to be said. Indeed, most people are unaware that there is even a difference.

We are used to writing things to be read: by our lecturers, our friends, our relatives, our bosses, our subordinates. Such everyday written communication is known as text. What we are not used to doing is speaking our written words out loud. Writing intended to be spoken and heard is known as script.

Every effective speaker must recognise that there are very important differences between text and script, namely:

Text	Script
is a journey at the reader’s pace	is a journey at the speaker’s pace
can be re-read, if necessary	is heard once, and only once
can be read in any order	is heard in the order it is spoken

Therefore, you must prepare a speech for an audience which cannot listen at its own pace; which cannot ask you to repeat parts it did not hear or understand and which cannot choose the order in which to consider your words.

Consider how the same sentiment might be conveyed by a writer, first using text and then script:

Text:

‘The meaning of marriage is not to be found in church services, or in romantic novels or films. We have no right to expect a happy ending. The meaning of marriage is to be found in all the effort that is required to make a marriage succeed. You need to get to know your partner, and thereby to get to know yourself.

Script:

‘The meaning of marriage isn’t to be found in wedding bells ... it isn’t the stuff of Mills and Boon romances ... there is no happy ever after. No, the meaning of marriage is in the trying and it’s about learning about someone else ... andthrough that learning about yourself.’

The lesson is clear: speak your words out loud before you commit them to paper. You will find that each element, each phrase, each sentence, will be built from what has gone before. Instinctively, you will take your listeners from the known to the unknown; from the general to the particular; from the present to the future.

3 Adding a sparkle to your speech

• Paint word pictures: watching a story unfold before your eyes is dramatic and memorable. The characters move. The scenes are in colour. The whole thing has life. Merely listening to a wordy description, however enthusiastically delivered, is a yawn.

Today most people are used to watching TV, not listening to radio. You need give your jokes and stories a graphic quality. People will appreciate this because it is what they are used to. The way to do this is not to tell jokes and stories, but to paint word pictures that allow your audience’s own imagination to take over. Don’t just tell a gag, paint it:

‘Let me tell you something about my best man. Soon after we met, Dave invited me to his eighteenth birthday party and he gave me details of his address and how to get there. He said, “A number 8 bus will bring you right to my door – 69 Della Street. Walk up to the front door and press the doorbell with your elbow.” “Why my elbow?” I asked. “Because you’ll have the wine in one hand and my prezzie in the other, won’t you?”’

Give your audience the right detail and they can see your word picture. And one picture is worth a thousand words.

• Use figurative language: try to make your speech colourful and original. Similes and metaphors are particularly useful devices. A simile is a figure of speech, usually introduced by like or as, that compares one thing to another:

‘Our love germinated like a seed in the dark.’

‘Our love is as eternal as the sea and the wind.’

Because a simile’s function is comparison, it is not as evocative as a metaphor. A metaphor does not so much compare as transform one thing to another. It is more subtle and revealing, stimulating imagery beyond the original transformation:

‘With the two of us it is just as it is with the honeysuckle that attaches itself to the hazel tree: when it has wound and attached itself around the trunk, the two can survive together, but if someone tries to separate them, the hazel dies quickly and the honeysuckle with it. Sweet love, so it is with us: you cannot live without me, nor I without you.’

Those words were spoken by Marie de France over 800 years ago – and they work just as well today.

Another useful figure of speech is hyperbole, or deliberately overstating your argument. In a wedding speech you can get away with saying things that most people would find embarrassing and even crass in everyday conversation:

‘You are the best parents in the world.’

Not only can you get away with it – such bizarre overstatement can be highly effective, bringing a lump to the throat and a tear to the eye:

‘I’ll love you till the ocean is folded and hung up to dry, and the seven stars go squawking like geese about the sky.’

• Engage all the senses: sensory details bring breadth and depth to your descriptions. We can learn a lot from writers of popular fiction. Take a look at this extract from The Fallen Curtain by Ruth Rendell:

Tea was lovely at gran’s. Fish and chips that she didn’t fetch from the shop but cooked herself, cream meringues and chocolate eclairs, tinned peaches with evaporated milk, the lot washed down with fizzy lemonade.

How much more effective this is than simply saying, ‘Gran doted on me and spoilt me something rotten at tea-time’.

Here Stephen King uses sensory details to bring a character to life in Carrie:

Norma led them around the dance floor to their table. She exuded odours of Avon soap, Woolworth’s perfume and Juicy Fruit gum.

And how about this from Katherine Mansfield:

Alexander and his friend in a train. Spring ... wet lilac ... spouting rain.

So few words yet the wetness is palpable.

• Make good use of symbolism: symbolism – employing a visual metaphor to underline a theme – is a natural aspect of communication. Children at play instinctively use symbols, making items ‘stand for’ aspects of their imaginary games. Advertisers strive to connect their products with abstract notions like success, nostalgia, or domestic bliss – thus a floor cleaner symbolically represents freedom (through liberation from household chores), while a tete-a-tete coffee symbolises passionate liaison.

Bah, humbug? Maybe, but it works. You’ll find symbols in most adverts. And the colour red crops up a lot: a red sunset to advertise a liquor, a bowl of red roses behind a bottle of scent, and of course all those obligatory red sports cars. Red is warm. It is vibrant, a symbol of passion, excitement and romance. When you want to suggest these things, use a strong symbol that will arouse the audience’s feelings and describe a variety of hot colours, especially red:

‘I took a walk in the park this morning. Every bush, every tree trembled with the fluttering of butterflies – beautiful red butterflies. It was magnificent. Yesterday there were no butterflies in my garden. Today there are thousands. Tomorrow there will be millions.’

4 Remembering rhythm

A good speech, should attract and hold listeners as a magnet holds and attracts iron filings. Here are a few more techniques that will grab your audience and add an almost magical, melodic quality to your speech:

• The rule of three: three is a magic number. People love to hear speakers talk to the beat of three. The effect of three words, three phrases or three sentences is powerful and memorable:

‘My mother gave me hope ... she gave me courage ... but most of all, she gave me love.’

‘Someone said that a true friend is a person who understands your past, believes in your future, and accepts you today just the way you are. If that’s true, (best man) is the best friend I have ever had.’

‘(Bride), from this day forth real joy will fill your days ... warm your nights ... and overflow your heart forever.’

• Parallel sentences: sentences that are parallel add a rhythmic beauty that help an audience anticipate and follow your thoughts:

‘Marriage is a celebration of love. Marriage is a celebration of life. Marriage is a celebration of joy.’

• Alliteration: the repetition of sounds and syllables, usually at the beginning of words, can help create just the right mood. Your speech will become special and spellbinding:

‘You are the most wonderful woman in the world ... and I worship you!’

• Repetition: if there is anything almost guaranteed to make an audience break out in spontaneous applause it is a repetition of strong, emotive words:

‘I will love you for ever ... and ever ... and ever!’

However, use the wrong words and it will fall flat. How does this sound?

‘I will think the world of

you indefinitely ...

indefinitely ...

indefinitely!’

It doesn’t work, does it?

5 Keeping it flowing

Have you noticed how entertainers, politicians and TV presenters move easily and unobtrusively from one topic to another? Like them, you can make your speech flow smoothly and gracefully from beginning to end by making use of a few of these simple devices:

• A bridge is a word that alerts an audience that you are changing direction or moving to a new thought:

‘So that’s how I met (bride). But romance didn’t blossom right away ...’

• A trigger is a repetition of the same word or phrase to link one topic with another:

‘That was what (bride) was like at school. Now I’ll tell you what she was like at college ...’

• A rhetorical question is a question which you ask – and answer:

‘How do you think my dashing best man spent yesterday evening? ...’

Some members of the audience may know both you and the bride very well, while others may only know one of you. Asking a rhetorical question is also an excellent way of telling people something while not insulting the intelligence of those already in the know:

‘What can I tell you about a girl who won the school prize for geography, represented the county at netball and passed her driving test... at the sixth attempt?’

• A flashback is a sudden shift to the past to break what seems to be a predictable narrative:

‘We first met in ...’

‘We both worked for...’

‘We started going out together when ...’ (yawn, yawn!)

It would have been far more interesting to have provided an unexpected flashback link, such as:

‘Today she’s the confident, woman-about-town you see before you. But five years ago she wasn’t like that...’

• A list is a very simple way of combining apparently unrelated incidents:

‘I remember three occasions when I got into trouble with my parents ...’

But don’t rely too heavily on lists because a catalogue of events soon becomes extremely tedious to listen to.

• A pause is a non-verbal way of showing your audience that you have finished one section of your speech and are about to move on to another.
• A physical movement is another non-verbal signal that you are moving on to something new. If you turn to the bride, your audience know that you are going to talk to her, or about her.
• A quotation, joke or story can also serve as an excellent link. Here a neat little one-liner is used to change the topic from how well-suited you are to you:

‘... so this really is a love match, pure and simple; (bride’s) pure and I’m ... a very nice man ...’