Graduation Speech
A graduation speech cold be the most significant speaking engagement you have ever undertaken. Particularly if you are a student speaker, one of the top graduates. For most people standing up in front of your peers to deliver a speech is a pretty daunting prospect. You have all of the nerves about making a fool of yourself, stumbling over the words, not being able to speak properly, looking out and seeing bored looking audience members and worse still, no one laughing at your humor. The frae people have about public speaking may be rather irrational but it feels very real. The strange thing is, there is a fairly simple formula to making a good graduation speech. It does however take a lot of hard work with the emphasis on practicing the speech until you know it very well. None of that will be beyond you and can be very good for you In terms of settling your nerves. Another rather excellent thing for the graduate speaker is that the audience will be on your side right from the start. The graduate and their families will be willing you to do a good job. They will laugh at your humor and they will applaud you to the end, unless you have set out to offend them.
You really just want to speak about things you know. You were there over the past few years. You know which funny events there were, you know how tough it has been to get through to graduation. You know how much it means to the graduates. You know of the special events at the school and the charity fund raising and help for the local community. Indeed if you sit down and write out what happened you will find lots of great stuff. You also know who the great personalities are, who contributed the most to the others and which teachers stood out. You know your own story and what happened along the way. You also know how much love and support you have received from your family and friends. You also know who have been your closest friends and just how much you will miss them when you go off to college. You also understand the hopes, fears and concerns the graduates have about the future.
Looking through all this material and working with the school you should be able to come up with some kind of graduation speech topic. Your graduation speech topic could be the benefits of perseverance, putting everything you have got into the future, and following your passion. The thing to do is arrange your past, present and future material in a way that supports the big theme. Then you can work on getting a good written speech. Let us say you decide to draw out lessons learned which will support you all in the future as the material would suggest there are quite a few. You can use the past material to draw out the errors and what lessons should have been learned. You still need to congratulate the graduates and thank all those who have taught you, mentored you, loved and supported you. Then you can talk about how each of the lessons learned can help you in the future. Not just that admitting mistakes but really learning from them.
Your graduation speech being written then just needs you to practice your delivery until you know it inside out.
