Although some glorious orators of antiquity did enjoy their unique capability to make a brilliant impromptu speech on various occasions, the majority of modern people need an autocue to seem confident and freely cope with their public speaking. However, a concise outline can as well be helpful to prepare a decent speech. Writing a wedding speech requires some painstaking preparatory work because the wedding speech genre comprises (1) proper structuring according to one’s wedding role; (2) being both laconic and meaningful. As far as wedding speeches differ in their traditional ‘scenarios’ and convey separate messages, each of them should be written in conformity with a suitable checklist. Nonetheless, we are able to point out a number of generally suitable tips. First, any wedding speech should be literally inscribed into specific rhetoric (and situational) frames. A speaker opens his/her piece with an introduction (greeting, etc.) and ends it up with a toast. An ideal wedding speech intro should be understandable to all the attendants and innovative enough to give food for one’s memory, thought and curiosity. A speaker can successfully play on the specificity of his/her speech and find some analogies to real life situations. For instance, a bride is encouraged to draw the line between her active “speaking” role in the wedding and her overall decisiveness: “‘Even though we’re at the start of a new millennium, some of you here today may still not be very familiar with the idea that the bride gets to give a speech too. Well, wait till I tell you how I proposed…”
A popular trend is to design a wedding speech intro as a story of writing the speech. The thing is, the process of a desperate search for some hilarious details can appear even more explosive than the ‘raw material’ per se. Besides, a speaker can humorously share his/her bias against writing a wedding speech and acknowledge his/her natural perplexity and nervousness in front of the guests: “A very warm welcome to everyone here today, at the end of what has been a perfect week for sales of Imodium…”. The final part of a wedding speech is a toast. According to the wedding etiquette, the order of toasting is as follows: (1) toast to the bride and groom; (2) toast to bridesmaids; (3) toast to parents.
