Teaching Ceremonial Speaking
Graduation Speeches, Wedding Toasts, Eulogies, & Other Topics
Ready to teach your students how to deliver appropriate, touching, and funny ceremonial speeches? Here are some tips.
If you're teaching a public speaking class, one of the most fun assignments you can do is the ceremonial speech. A ceremonial speech is one that marks a rite of passage or accomplishment, such as a graduation, a wedding, a funeral, a retirement, or an award. Whether you're teaching middle school, high school, or college, students usually find this assignment rewarding and useful.
Here are some tips for teaching students how to give a ceremonial speech.
Choosing a Ceremonial Speech Topic
First, you need to help students find appropriate topics that have personal relevance. Students will get much more out of this assignment if they create speeches for real situations in their lives, or for hypothetical situations that could happen to them in the future. A student might give a wedding toast for her older sister's hypothetical wedding, and another might give a retirement speech for his grandfather. Here are some ideas for choosing a ceremonial speech topic.
Should you avoid sensitive topics? You can largely leave that up to the student. If a student wants to give a eulogy for a classmate who died last year, talk to the student about whether he or she feels this assignment will be therapeutic, or whether it will be too traumatic. It may be necessary to tell a student not to do a particular topic, but as much as possible, let students make up their own minds.
Telling Stories
The trick to effective ceremonial speaking is to tell stories about the person or event in question, and to avoid speaking in a generic way. A good ceremonial speech should only be able to apply to one person or event. If the same speech could be used for something else, it's too generic. This is the most difficult part of this speech assignment, so spend some time teaching students to tell stories.
A good example to use to explain this to students is a graduation speech. Have the prepare a cliche graduation speech that contains references that could used for any graduation, like "spread your wings and fly" and "you are the future." Then, have your students come up with material for a graduation speech that could only work for their particular class. Have them tell funny and touching stories about students, teachers, events, and other things that are meaningful to them.
Another way to teach students how to tell stories is to do an impromptu exercise where they tell endearing and touching stories about people in their lives-- like someone's mother's obsession with stuffed Winnie the Pooh toys, or someone's best friend's constant tendency to get lost.
Appropriateness
Another important lesson to teach students about ceremonial speaking is appropriateness. Although ceremonial speeches can be very creative, there are certain things you must say and cannot say for fear of alienating the audience. For example, you wouldn't talk about Uncle Bob's extramarital affair in his eulogy, and you wouldn't talk about Aunt Mary's hatred of the boss in her retirement speech.
A fun way to teach this is to help the students write speeches that are very inappropriate. For example, have them write an inappropriate toast to the groom. The speaker can talk about the groom's hot ex-girlfriend and the bride's weight gain and can offer doubts about the couple's future.
The ceremonial speech topic can be fun and touching-- and also very useful, as students may well be asked to deliver a speech like this one day. Be sure to spend a fair amount of time with this special unit and teach your students how to deliver excellent ceremonial speeches.
