During the wedding reception it falls to the father of the bride to kick off the speeches. His speech normally involves talking about his daughter, the (by now blushing) bride.
The father of the bride then usually hands over to the groom to make a speech, who makes it on behalf of the bride and himself. As he is making the speech on behalf of both of them he should start his speech with ‘My wife and I’. However more and more these days the bride opts to make her own speech.
Due to the fact that wedding audiences are a very diverse bunch they are considered a hard group to write for. The speech content, and especially any humor used, needs to be suitable for the very young and very old alike. The speech must not be offensive for any age, gender, or religion. This can be very difficult to get just right, and preventing the speech from sounding formulaic and cliché ridden requires a great deal of thought and planning.
Grooms speeches should be less serious than those of the father of the bride, while also being less humorous than that of the best man. It needs to fall somewhere between the two. It needs to be both functional and sincere but sprinkled with the appropriate amount of humor.
At the end of his speech the groom invites the maid of honor to make her speech, if she is making one that is. If the maid of honor is not making a speech then the groom should introduce the bridesmaid’s speech, again if there is one. Failing that the groom should invite the best man to make his speech, and then stand by to be suitably embarrassed!
Before my wedding came around I had been a guest at many friends’ weddings, where I witnessed some really good grooms speeches, and some rather bad ones that were very uncomfortable and embarrassing to watch. One was so bad that people were queuing to go to the toilet just to escape it.
I knew that I couldn’t let this happen at my wedding, and I was determined that my grooms speech would be as good as possible. To this end I trawled the web for information on how to write a good speech. I found a few golden nuggets, but the vast majority of information out there was pure rubbish to be honest.
I purchased a few book online and I was heartened to find that the quality was so much better. Not only were the speeches better written so that they flowed better, but there were some great ideas for content that I hadn’t have even thought of.
The books also contained sample speeches that I was able to mix and match, and because the speeches in each book were all written by the same author they blended together superbly. Contrast this with trying to put together a speech consisting of various passages gleaned from the internet from a variety of different contributors written in distinctly different styles.
