How To Write A Best Man Speech - And Enjoy Delivering It

Go from “Aaaargh” to “I’m ready”

Do you lie awake all night?

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Relax.
With a bit of prep, you’ll be fine.
In fact, you’ll be great!

There are five steps to making any speech – at a wedding or anywhere else. Beginners, not knowing any better, often start with step 2. Big mistake!

1. Assess the occasion, the audience, and your purpose
2. Arrange your material
3. Make it more stylish
4. Commit it to memory
5. Deliver it

Obviously, there’s a lot more to each of those steps.

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To see what I mean, you can go deeper into no 1. using this worksheet:

Give An Unforgettable Speech

This paperback, A Modest Book About How To Make An Adequate Speech, was written by – coughs – me, John-Paul Flintoff.

The best-selling American author Jay Heinrichs thinks I should have called it “The Indispensable Guide To Giving An Unforgettable Speech”.

The principles in the book apply to wedding speeches.

✅ They work if you are best man to a friend.
✅ Or best man to your brother, or cousin.
✅ They work if you are sharing the job with somebody else.
✅ And whether you know the bride well, or not.
✅ In fact, they work if you are the bride. (But that’s another story.)

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An Expert Says…

Having just arrived at my website, you may think I want you to buy my book. (You can, on Amazon, or at Bookshop.org.)

But that’s not why I set up this page.

I set it up to help people like you who are planning to make a wedding speech.

Because that’s a fine, wonderful, generous thing to do. Shines a bit of warm light into a world that, frankly, can be rather dark at times.

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Are You Ready?

When it comes to speech-making, there are two kinds of readiness:

1. having everything planned in meticulous detail, right down to the timing of individual hand-movements.

2. being “ready for anything”.

The second kind of readiness is usually called confidence. It arises naturally as a result of working on the first, preparation.

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