6 Ways to Make a Commencement Speech Soar
Kudos to speechwriters Vinca Lafleur and Jeff Nussbaum for a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education on 6 Ways to Make a Commencement Speech Soar.
They note:
…graduations are high-quality speaking occasions, with a sizable, knowledgeable, multigenerational audience; an upbeat theme; an aura of pageantry and pomp; and a decent chance of sunshine. A well-prepared speaker with a well-crafted speech can entertain, inform, inspire, and give a performance immortalized for posterity on YouTube.
The piece of advice I liked the best:
This day is about your listeners, which means that you need to apply your worldview to theirs. A commencement speech is not a scholarly dissertation. It is a meditation on life by someone who has presumably lived more of it than his or her audience.
2 Comments so far
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Exactly right. The best commencement speakers bridge the gap between their own life experience and the hopes, dreams (and fears) of the graduates.
By Jeffrey Porro on 05.01.09 1:09 pm
Nice Post. For more on this, check out this post giving a template for a commencement
speech.http://speechworks.net/wordpress/focusmessage/template-valedictory-speech/
By Joey Asher on 05.11.09 6:18 am
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