An effective technique for opening your speech is to use a quotation about love and marriage. The opening is the hook of your speech. It is what draws in the audience. It is absolutely crucial that you nail this part of your speech. You want to spend the majority of your time writing and rehearsing the opening and the conclusion. The reason is that after a few days, the only parts of your speech that will most likely be remembered are the opening and conclusion.
There are three primary objectives to any opening. Firstly, you must grab the audience’s attention. The second objective is to give the audience an idea of what you will be speaking about. Finally, the opening also sets the tone for the speech. The tone might be humorous, sentimental or anything else but you do want to set the tone. It can be difficult to follow a speech that bounces around. I remember reading one speech that was hysterical and then shifted into some serious philosophical thoughts on love.
However, a well placed quotation can be used in the body or even in the toast of the speech. The reason quotations are usually found in the introduction is because the speaker does not want to disrupt the flow of the speech. It is not important that the quotation is famous but rather that the quotation used is relevant. For example, I remember one quotation for a Best Man speech that used
the quotation by an unknown author: ‘Love is a symbol of eternity. It wipes out all sense of time, destroying all memory of a beginning and all fear of an end.”
I remember another wedding speech where the speaker actually related the quotation to the couple who was sitting by his side. As they were staring into each other’s eyes he said, Antoine de Saint-Exupery once said, “Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking together in the same direction.”
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