How To Write A Bat Mitzvah Speech

Hi, I'm Lawerence Berstein, a professional speech writer and I run greatspeechwriting.co.uk.

Irrespective of the sort of speech that you're going to give, there are two or three key things to bear in mind. Firstly, there is nothing to beat preparation and hopefully, you're not watching this twenty four hours before you're due to give your speech. But the more time you leave yourself, the better.

Second of all, don't worry about speaking for too long. Often a five minute speech is much much more powerful and impactful than a twenty minute one. And, brevity is often the key.

And finally, although a lot of the videos that I've created are about writing a speech, please remember that you can't think about writing and delivering separately; they are one in the same thing. You're writing to make the speech easier to deliver and if you think of it that way then the thing should work. So you're preparing a Bat Mitzvah speech, and there are obviously a number of speeches that can be given on the day, so let's assume for the moment that you are the proud father and the most important thing to do right from the start while you're preparing the speech is to split it into the things you have to say and then the things that might want to say.

Now the "have to's" will generally involve a roll call of thank you's and something about your other half, something probably about grandparents, people who travelled a long way, and the rest of the family thanking guests for their time and generosity and ending with a toast probably to your son, which leaves some room for some more creative stuff, generally about the Bat Mitzvah himself. Now, where you go next depends very much on your own style and as with so many other speeches, I suggest that you start by wondering how you want this speech to be received afterwards. Do you want people to come up to you and tell you it's the funniest Bat Mitzvah speech they've ever heard? Or do you want the whole reaction to be much more sincere and to come across much more emotionally and to have people closer to tears than to laughter? And if you have that in mind, then suddenly when you start to write down your notes, then you'll have a context into which to write.

The context will be made even more straightforward when you make the things relevant as possible. Not just to you and your relationship with your son and the rest of the family, but also to the rest if the people in that room because the last thing that they -or probably he- will want to hear is some elongated curricular veto where you explain every great achievement that he has managed to tick off in his thirteen years on this earth. That really isn't what you're there for.

You're there to give a much higher level summary on a much more personal level. This isn't just about his eleven plus results, or the number of goals that he scored for his school team, this is a more fundamental time in his life and from a cultural and religious perspective. It's a real turning point, and on that basis this is a time to talk about values, to talk about the reasons you are proud of him over and above the superficial.

His kindness, his generosity, the relationship he may have with other siblings, the respect that he has for the elder members of the family. Now, those can be told anecdotally, and that you can make people laugh while you're doing them but please stay away from fact after fact about your son which in the end people are going to be bored by. On the flip side, let's not turn this into some cheesy speech full of intimate jokes that people have heard a million times before.

There's obviously a middle ground and again that balance between humor and sincerity becomes absolutely vital. And I would say, as a real rule of thumb, this is a speech for sixty percent sincerity, lightened up with thirty/forty percent humor. And if you can find a theme that the people in that room would find amusing and that really would pull together