Wedding Speech, One Week Time Table

Wedding Speeches - The One Week Timetable

I have one week to prepare for my wedding speech - what do I need to do?

First of all, you might be sitting there thinking: "How on earth am I going to do this in a week?" On the other hand, you might be thinking: "Do it in a week? No problem."

If you belong to the first category I would say: "Stay calm, what you have to do is possible." If you belong to the second category (although if you do, you may be unlikely to be reading this!), I would say: "That's fine, but please make sure that you have a full appreciation of the different elements of the task in hand.

Unless you have already planned what to say, the first thing to do, if you haven't already, is to go to our website and get the Master Class Wedding Speech Secrets be it one for a Groom, Best Man or Father of the Bride. You will be able to work best with the pack if you print it off.

Plan your Preparations Next, consider your schedule for the week ahead.

How much free time do you have? Is it spaced evenly throughout the week? When can you rely on not being interrupted? Are your lunch hours available? Is it possible for you to book a day off work?

You need to set aside time to assess your Master Class material and make your selections from it, time to think up your own personal material, time to collate it all together and order it, time to get it onto cards (which you need to schedule in time to buy), and time to practise.

At the start of the week prepare a schedule charting exactly when you will do what and for how long. As the week progresses, keep track of how you're doing; if you lose time on one activity you'll have to speed up somewhere else. However please don't worry; there has been many a wedding speaker who has been in this situation and has succeeded massively, especially those who have been smart enough to take advantage of our Master Class Wedding Speech Secrets !!

Work out What to say

You can give a completely successful wedding speech simply by using one of the examples in our speeches packs. You can improve on it by adding two or three personal reminiscences, thus customising it for your particular wedding and guests.

So, you have your pack. Read through it - all of it (I know there's a lot, but it's a great opportunity to practise your speed reading!) and highlight jokes, quotes and toasts that appeal to you.

Whenever you have a spare moment, consider your Master Class Wedding Speech Secrets; remember that it is quite alright to choose sections from different speeches to create your own composite speech.

As you walk or commute around trawl through your memories for anecdotes etc which you can use. Carry a notebook so that you can write them down straight away. Don't leave it at the office! Also, do read the help files on our website; there is a great deal of useful advice on matters ranging from preparing your notes to practising and control of nerves.

Practice and Rehearse And lastly, don't panic. And to help you not to panic, be sure to get some practising in - as much as you can find time for.

Lots of practise won't make a bad speech good, but no practise is likely to make an otherwise good speech bad. No-one wants this to happen, least of all you.
Practise in front of a mirror and pretend that you are there at the top table, delivering to a packed house before taking your seat to massive applause.

If you follow these guidelines plus those in our Help Files and choose material from our pack which you genuinely like, backing it up with two or three solid personal contributions, it is difficult to see anything stopping you from being an immense success.

Bruno Barton :)

Copyright 2008 FineSpeeches.com
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Creating Original Humour, Lesson Five, Anagrams

Creating Original Humour for your Wedding Speech, Lesson Five, Using Anagrams

In this article I demonstrate how to create and use anagrams for a wedding speech to further enhance your armoury of humour creating skills.

Anagrams can be very funny and a well chosen one can go down a treat.

Anagrams are a rich load to tap into: anagrams of the Groom's name, the Bride's name, the Bride and Groom's Christian names, the Groom's football team , the parents names, the towns where the families live, the location of the wedding (town, venue) etc are all appropriate subjects for an anagram.

There are a couple of ways that you can create them:-

The first, the hardest, is to toy with the word / phrase / name you wish to anagramise with nothing more than a piece of paper, a pen and your brain.
The other way is to use anagram-finding services on the internet, some of these are on-line others are downloadable software.

Some of the available ones are:-
WordSmith Anagram Artist, Anagram Genius

If you search for "Anagrams" or "Anagram Services online" at a search engine you will find many online sources of anagrams. Some are simple to use as well as free but leave you having to search all the letter combinations to identify useful or funny ones.

This can be extremely laborious, and I would recommend not being caught up with such a service, and instead using more sophisticated products.

The one which I like best is Anagram Genius.

You can download a free version which is quite serviceable or pay 30 dollars or so for the Gold version which is excellent for our purposes. During the rest of this discussion I am referring to Anagram Genius, but the same methods work with any anagram service.

Please bear in mind that for our purposes an anagram doesn't have to be absolutely exactly correct - if it suits your comic purposes by all means change the odd letter - if done sparingly it is very unlikely that anyone will challenge you on this, even if they notice.

However you may well feel more satisfied by a completely accurate anagram. Fortunately it is possible to make some tremendously funny or appropriate anagrams.

This is how I do it:-

Your first step is to list the names, ideas etc which you intend to anagramise.
To achieve useable anagrams you have to try different permutations - for instance "Mark and Anne" on its own might not give the software enough to work on, but try it first and then try Mark and Anne Smith (for example), and if you don't get anything useable from that expand it a little more, eg: Anne and Mark Smith Aston Villa fans.

Try the name of the church where the wedding is taking place, the name of the reception venue, the Bride's maiden name, etc, etc

An effective anagram program will:-

sort the anagrams in order of %age effectiveness, ie best anagrams first use artificial intelligence to arrange each anagram into roughly grammatical sentences, and includes slang words (but be sure not to use undue coarse language!)

In other words it can do a lot of the 'donkey work' for you, by identifying the anagrams which are most likely to be useful.

So, plug in the name / phrase you wish to anagramise. But what are you looking for?

Ideally a connection with a facet of the Groom's / Brides personality or personal history.

Anagram examples
Here are a couple of examples taken from speeches written for Sparkling Speech (my tailored speech-writing web service) customers.

[1] I wrote a speech for one Best Man, whose best friend, the Groom, had, for mist-shrouded historical reasons, the nickname Dom. The Best Man was delighted when I shared with him the choice nugget that Dom's full name was an anagram of "warm old sniveller", and with my suggestion that in his speech he should propose a re-name to "Wos".

[2] Another customer, a Groom, was a staunch member of an Elim Pentecostal Church known for their passionate singing. Anagram Genius told me that "Elim Pentecostal Church" was an anagram of "ace tonsil temple", a fact which went down a storm when he delivered his speech.

[3] For another example, consider a Bride who makes a habit of collecting shopping coupons and is getting married at St Thomas' Church, Bournville. What could be more appropriate than to discover that she should be wooed by "voucher charms not bullshit"?

[4] A good prospect is the Groom's / Bride's favourite sporting team. Try just the first part of the name, then if that yields nothing, add the rest of the name. For instance, try "Manchester United" and if that fails, try "Manchester United Football Club", etc

[5] Using anagram creation software I have found that "Aston Villa Football Club" is an anagram of "full vocal slob battalion," "Manchester United " is an anagram of "dream stench unite", and "Manchester United Football Club" is an anagram of "accentuated run-of-the-mill blobs."

I have to say that it takes a little time to find anagrams like these, but I would say that if you have seven or eight names / combinations to search under, you'll probably be able to do them all in a couple of hours.

Anagram Genius has a couple of extra features, one of which is its archive collection of the very best anagrams created, arranged under headings as diverse as sport, TV and politics. It's well worth having a quick look to see if there's anything there you can use.

One example: "Manchester United footballer David Beckham" is an anagram of "Man, the bloke blundered! Fetch Victoria Adams!"

You can use anagram software to create entertaining aliases. For example, if your name happened to be Slobodan Milosevic and you were female, you might decide on an alias of Miss Cleo Viola Bond.

One final note on anagrams: don't overload your speech with them. I think the rule of three applies well here.

Use them sparingly, no more than three and if you use more than one try to use anagrams that complement and support each other.

And remember, a lot of work has been done for you in the Master Class Wedding Speech Secrets :)

Bruno Barton


Copyright 2008 FineSpeeches.com
No part of this article may be copied, transmitted, stored or used in anyway without the express permission of finespeeches.com. The adoption of any of our RSS feeds includes with it our express permission to receive and or display our unaltered content.

Creating Original Humour, Lesson 3, Rule Of Three

Creating Original Humour for your Wedding Speech, Lesson Three: The Rule of Three

Hello folks and welcome to this lesson on how to personalise your wedding speech humour.

This time we're considering the creation of jokes using what's known in humour writing circles as The Rule of Three. This is a triple sequence which is used to increase suspense and tension with a longer build up, leading (hopefully) to an uproarious laugh at the end.

The Rule of Three has been used for centuries in creative writing of all sorts, but particularly in children's stories. For instance there's the three blind mice, the three little pigs and Goldilocks and the three bears, to mention just three (how's that for a quick rule of three!)

This device works because the audience / reader is compelled to wait for the payoff, which in the world of humour is the punchline… and not only that but is compelled to wait just the right amount of time.

Please bear in mind that the majority of your jokes should come in "singles", not "triples". But consider this: a joke in "twos" for some reason generally doesn't work - somehow the delay and correspondingly the suspense isn't long enough, and a "four" is normally far too long.

There is something about a joke set up as a three that makes it work just right. One may be funny, two isn't, four isn't, but three is. And it's generally more effective than the same joke told as a "single."

Let's illustrate this with an example. The most famous type of Rule of Three joke is the legendary: "An Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman were in a…"
Now I don't for a minute suggest that you use one of these in your wedding speech as they are generally outrageously politically incorrect.

A politically correct one however will illustrate my message nicely, even though it's as old as the hills. Don't worry, there'll be some brand new ones in a few moments.

Here goes:

An Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman were in a field. The Englishman said: "Look at that English cow over there." The Irishman said: "No, it's an Irish cow." But the Scotsman said: "Actually, you're both wrong. It's a Scottish cow. Look, it's got bagpipes under it."

Would this work as a single ?

A Scotsman was in a field and said: "Look, you can tell that's a Scottish cow because it's got bagpipes under it." I don't think so. So you can see that "tripling up" does improve this joke. (It's probably just as well!)

I'm not suggesting that you pepper your wedding speech with Rule of Three jokes, but certainly one would be a fine addition to the style and content of your speech, and maybe even two.

How do you create a Rule of Three joke?

First of all the third part needs to be funny; for that you need an element of surprise - set up the joke in the introduction, delay the surprise once, delay it twice and Bingo! In goes the punchline.

How about these, specially created for this article:

1. "Ellen always takes 3 hours and 3 seconds to get ready: one hour to put on her make up, two hours to choose an outfit and 3 seconds to make up an excuse for being late."

2. "Katy was driving me to work recently. We had a row and she accused me of being childish. So I got out of the car, slammed the door and caught a choo-choo instead."

3. "Teachers have been given permission to deal with classroom thugs - now they can give them a clip around one ear, a clip around the other and shove 500 volts between them."

Going from the sublime to the ridiculous is another good way of getting laughs. This is true of humour generally, but particularly with Rule of Three.

Here's an example:

Now, as many of you know, Harry runs a successful business in property maintenance, although he has always been very modest about this. This caused a slight problem recently when he designed some new business cards.
He started with "Harry Stone - Managing Director," but he thought that was too boastful.

Then he went for "Harry Stone - executive in charge of commercial property, including air conditioning and sanitation." Trouble was that was too long.
So in the end he opted for "Harry Stone, bogs and boilers a speciality!"

Well that's about all for this month. I wish you all the best with your preparations.

With your Master Class Wedding Speech Secrets you will Double Guarantee your sucess in satisfying both your audience and yourself on the Big Day.

Good luck!

Bruno Barton :)

Copyright 2008 FineSpeeches.com

No part of this article may be copied, transmitted, stored or used in anyway without the express permission of finespeeches.com. The adoption of any of our RSS feeds includes with it our express permission to receive and or display our unaltered content.