Expanding your draft speech

Yesterday I posted about how to brainstorm the ideas that will make up the bulk of your Father of the Bride speech, focusing on your daughter, her husband to be and your thoughts on marriage. Today I want you to expand on those ideas to create a complete outline for your speech - it won't be the final version, but all the elements will be in place. Let's take a look at the entire structure:

Overview

1. Introduction - Welcome the guests and thank them for sharing such an important day, remembering to mention anyone who made a particular effort by name. Also, although it is traditional for the bride's father to pay for the wedding, that isn't always the case these days and so ensure you thank anyone else who has contributed.

2. Your daughter - tell her and everyone else how proud you are of her based on your notes from yesterday.

3. You son-in-law - welcome him into your family; again, you should have notes from yesterday.

4. Start if talking about marriage and how it benefited you, but you can use this to speak about anything else appropriate too. You may like to add some humor, but steer clear of anything controversial or potentially offensive.

5. Wish the bride and groom a successful and happy marriage and propose a toast to the bride and groom.

Okay, so that was a brief overview and you should basically have enough material for points 2,3 and 4, so we need to take a closer look at your welcome and toast. Here we go...

Welcome

"Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to thank you all for coming here today to celebrate the marriage of [daughter] to [son-in-law], with a special mention to [name1] and [name2] for traveling from far and wide and who I haven't seen for years.

While one of the great privileges of being being [bride's] father is that I get to pay for the wedding, I'd also like to thank [whoever else contributed] for sharing the cost and helping to make today that extra bit special."


Toast

"Anyway, I'd like to wish [bride] and [groom] every success and the exceedingly happy marriage they deserve. Please charge your glasses for... the bride and groom."

That's it - short and to the point. You never want you speech to drag on for longer that is welcome, so keep each element to the point, but make sure you make whatever it is you're going to say your own - you should personalize the speech and say it how YOU speak, not how I write, and flesh it out more if appropriate. Also, if you would prefer to add some humor, then by all means add it, as long as you'll be comfortable with it on the day.


Now you have enough content for your first draft of your wedding speech. In my next post I'll discuss taking the content and putting it all together to shape it for a more polished version.