How To Write A Groom 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 24 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 20-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're one and the same thing.

You're writing to make the speech easy to deliver. And if you think of it that way, then the thing should work. So you're ready to write your groom speech.

And before you start putting pen to paper, I think there's a number of things to think about to try and maximize the chances of getting it right. First of all, there's a lot of things that you have to say. So let's call those the must-haves.

And on the other hand, you've got things that it might be quite nice to say that could lighten the speech up a bit which we'll call them might-haves. So let's just run those must-haves from the groom's perspective. You're going to want to say something quite significant about your new wife.

You're going to want to thank people who have come to the wedding. You're going to want to mention probably your own parents and your own family. You're going to want to mention your in-laws and hopefully, the welcome that they've given you into their family.

Then, there may be a number of other things that you need to drop in for your own personal circumstances but most groom speeches will end traditionally with a toast to the bridesmaids. Around which time, you will probably also mention the best men or best man who will be speaking after you. Fact, a hell of a lot of must-haves and the key to writing your speech is that they don't appear to come out like some sort of tick list on the school register and that you can weave them together in a way along with the might-haves that brings the thing to life.

So, the key at this stage is to work out how you want your audience or the people at your wedding to react when you finish speaking. Now, if you want them to be laughing out loud and thinking that you are the wittiest groom on record then obviously, you're going to plot a very different speech to the one where you have the, you know, audience weeping away at emotion at the way that you've opened yourself up and told them all about your unrequited love for the woman you've just married. And it is working through it that way that will help you create a structure for some of the other stories and anecdotes that you want to include in a way that won't make the thing either too dull, too long or completely irrelevant.

So let's assume the majority of the might-haves want to focus on your bride. Now, on the romantic side, you might want to talk about how you met. You might want to talk about falling in love with her.

You might want to talk about your proposal. You might want to talk about not being able to wait to spend the rest of your life together. But together with nothing to lighten them up, this makes for a pretty heavy speech.

And so anecdotes can be about the things you love about her that may not be so obvious to people. The things you've got to love about her which are her little quirks. The way she reminds you of other people.

And begin to create that balance that can show that you actually have a real life relationship rather than some sort of storybook romance that may not quite hang together properly when you're delivering it in front of a hundred of your closest friends and family. Don't forget the structure. The structure is key and will e