You may be planning your groom speech or thinking about how best to deliver your best man speech. Whatever the occasion, have you thought about using a professional wedding speech writer to help you?
Why Would You Use a Professional to Help with Your Wedding Speech?
It is a fair enough question. As are these:
- Why use someone you have never met, who doesn’t know you and who you may never meet again to write what is probably the most important speech of your life?
- Why tell a complete stranger many of your deepest secrets and innermost thoughts?
- Isn’t it cheating to have your own words written, or even edited, by someone else?
- There is only really one answer, which is that when something matters this much to you, you may believe that you are not in the best position to get it quite right.
Most people who need the help of a professional wedding speech writer fall into one of these four categories:
- They find it hard to put pen to paper
- They find it hard to deliver words in front of the guests
- They’re just too busy to find the time
- A combination of the above
A professional simply seeks to reduce your stress by providing the writing skills and coaching on delivery to enable you to give the best speech possible. You may think getting help is cheating, but on that basis so is surfing the internet for recycled quotes, or buying books about how to make a great speech.
Unfortunately, those two routes have been walked many times. This means that although they may contain a lot of sense, they also tend to have been copied to death. A professional speech writer should guarantee you originality.
It is actually a little bizarre that people are so embarrassed about seeking help for a wedding speech. After all, public speaking is a renowned phobia, and a professional can help provide the confidence you require to overcome it.
Huge amounts of money goes into organising the perfect wedding day. But unlike the flowers, the starters or the fifth glass of wine, most people will go home afterwards and remember the speeches. At a work event they can make the difference between winning or losing a piece of business. In politics they can be the catalyst leading to an election victory or humiliation.
Come to think of it, why don’t more people use a professional speech writer?!
Why Wouldn’t You Use a Professional Wedding Speech Writer?
Of course, you still may not think you need help with your wedding speech. You shouldn’t get professional help writing and delivering your wedding speech if you…
- Are certain your version won’t be littered with cut-and-paste jokes and phrases from the internet.
- Have mastered the knack of writing in short punchy sound-bites with natural pauses for breath in the right places.
- Are able to thread a number of themes, stories and ideas into a coherent, seamless script.
- Have a natural feel for how to create the right balance between humour and sincerity in a speech.
- Have lots of spare time to craft a number of drafts of a speech until you are certain that not one word is wasted.
- Understand the best ways to weave the mundane lists of wedding-day ‘thank yous’ into the speech so no one quite realises how many people you have mentioned.
- Have the knack of developing your speech around a theme to hold it together.
- Instinctively know how certain words and phrases just don’t work when spoken out loud.
- Are able to sum up long stories and complicated relationships in a small and interesting couple of phrases.
- Can read through the speech you have written and be certain that it is entirely original and relevant to the audience on the day.
- Are certain that when you stand up you won’t wish you’d got some help.
- Are certain that when you sit down again you won’t wish you’d got some help.
If you can say ‘yes’ to all those questions then you don’t need the help of a professional wedding speech writer.
Guest post by Lawrence Bernstein of Great Speech Writing
Image from Andrew J R Squires Photography
