It’s the biggest day of your life. The wedding ceremony is now behind you, but the worst part is still to come, making your dreaded groom’s speech. You can hear the father of the bride giving his speech in the background but you are not listening to it, you are too nervous about giving your speech next.

You hear some applause and glance sideways to glimpse the father of the bride, just in time to hear him introduce your speech. You gulp. You have every reason to be nervous, because if you get this right you are the hero of the day, but if you get it wrong …

What happens next is largely a result of the amount of planning and preparation you have put into the speech. In reality this is easier said than done, the run up to your wedding is one of the busiest and stressful times of your life. You have a wedding, a reception, a honeymoon, and also certain lifestyle changes to plan for.

There is so much to do, so many people to placate! Despite all of this you really do need to set aside some time to work on your speech. Although generically referred to as grooms speeches, it is really the groom making a speech on behalf of both the bride and him, and so the speech should start off with ‘My wife and I’.

In your speech you need to acknowledge the speech just given by the father of the bride, you also need to thank all of the people involved in the wedding ceremony and the reception, all the people who have come along to wish you well and who may have given gifts, and of course both sets of parents.

Once all the thanks are out of the way you could then talk about how you first met your new wife, mention the experiences that you have shared together, and what made you decide that this was the person that you wanted to spend the rest of your life with.

Mention how beautiful your wife looks today, making sure that you are looking at her when you say it; you don’t want to be seen to be reading this from your speech! Explain how exited you feel about starting a new life together, and about your confidence in a long and happy marriage ahead.

In keeping with tradition you should conclude your speech by thanking your best man and explaining why he is so special to you. And then to stop it sounding too soppy you should have a gentle but humorous dig at him. It’s his speech next and he’s bound to have some embarrassing tales to tell about you, so it’s fair game to get in first! End by introducing the best man’s speech, and by asking him to be gentle with you (he won’t of course, but it’s worth a try!).

The fact that you have been busy leading up to the wedding day is a very lame excuse for delivering a poor grooms speech. To fail at the biggest speech of your life will do you no favors whatsoever with your new wife and in-laws. This key speech needs to demonstrate that it was crafted with love and respect for the occasion, and not just thrown together during the car ride from the service to the reception.

That’s not to say that writing the speech is easy. You may spend some hours staring at a piece of paper containing the words ’My wife and I’ before you can figure out what else to write. Luckily you will be forced to abandon it at this stage as something really urgent usually comes up, like having to make a cup of coffee or having to check those pesky emails (again!).

After repeating this cycle a few times it becomes obvious that a little help is required to start you off. You decide to scour the web for any examples of grooms speeches that you can find. You invariably find that the examples you find are all poor quality, cliché riddled, and regurgitated rubbish, and ones that your wedding guests will have heard many times before.

Your speech must use words that you normally use, and be delivered in your normal style. Anything else and your wedding guests will latch onto the fact that you have not written it yourself. Not only that, but because the content and style will be so alien to you, you will not feel comfortable about giving the speech, or confident enough to pull it off successfully.

Fear not though. There is a way that you can get your hands on examples of high quality proven and tested speeches crafted by professional authors. These can be modified to suit your personal circumstances and your preferred style of presentation. As they will be all written by the same author the examples can be mixed and matched to give you a smooth and free-flowing groom’s speech.