Wedding Speeches - The One Month Timetable

I have one month to prepare for my wedding speech - what do I need to do?

You will save a great deal of time and the quality of your material will be assured if you buy a Finespeeches.com wedding speech pack. In this article I assume that you are planning to buy from us.

If your choice is to write the whole of your speech yourself without our material, you must allow extra time to find or create you own humour and linking sentences and to craft the tone and style appropriately to your personality, audience and the occasion.

Your first action, then, is to download our speech pack by following the instructions available on the "Buy" page.

Once you have accessed your speech pack, read through the 5 speeches provided, decide whether you will use one speech as it is, or if you will mix and match from the 5 speeches.

Read through the extra jokes, quotes and toasts and put a tick beside the ones you like.

Spend a little time collating extra information from your memories and research with friends and relatives, and jot down any jokes that you have heard which are appropriate.

Also, do have a go at creating some original humour for the personalities involved in your wedding. This may not be as difficult for you as it sounds. Please see my earlier Bruno's Columns for a whole series on this subject.

Decide on your 'final' material for the speech, bearing in mind you only need 15 or so snippets or jokes to fill 5 minutes when wrapped with linking material.

If you are unsure of any of this material you may wish at this stage to bounce it off someone to ensure that it is inoffensive to everybody.

The next stage is to arrange the material in a logical order, interspersing it with the material chosen from the Finespeeches pack.

Now work on the exact wording you will be using for your opening. It is great to start off almost any speech in any circumstance with humour. If you can get them to laugh near the beginning it relaxes both yourself and the audience. If you can do this, everything else should be plain sailing. So choose your opening remarks very carefully indeed; get an early laugh and you're on your way.

I recommend choosing your conclusion next, so that you are establishing the beginning and the end first, making them witty, sincere and profound. Your speech is like a bridge crossing a river; it needs solid foundations before the graceful arch can be constructed.

In writing the links you need words and phrases which smoothly progress from one passage to the next. Use transitional phrases like 'by the way' 'which reminds me' or 'changing the subject completely' and 'which leads me onto'.

Conclude you speech with a toast, chosen from those provided in the speech pack or one of your own.

Now put your speech away for a couple of days. Come back to it refreshed and go through it with a fine toothcomb. Do you still find the humour funny? Are you happy with the choice of linking words? How about the exact wording of the jokes and anecdotes?

Stringently remove and replace less effective words throughout the speech.

Put the speech away for a couple of days.

Do the same again until you are fully happy with the material.

When satisfied with the content, you will need to reduce it to a set of notes on cards. Full guidelines are given in the "Free Help" section of our website. These guidelines have been developed from my own experiences over nearly 20 years as a speaker. They work for me, they will work for you too.

When you have your notes, I urge you to practise, practise, practise as much as you can. As you are preparing several weeks in advance, you have the opportunity to rehearse to such an extent that on the day you will know your material backwards. Make the most of this! Again the place to look for guidelines is the "Practise" section of our "Free Help" page.

I hope this all goes really well for you. If you follow this advice, it will.