10： Special Speech
PRESENTATION SPEECH
An award presentation speech can be longer than introducing a speaker, depending on the situation. The emphasis is on the recipient’s past actions, not what the recipient will say when accepting the award. Here’s a classic example.
Example: Presentation Speech
Colorado Beautification Award
By Mayor Mary Herron
As Mayor of Colorado, California, I am frequently called on to present awards and commendations, but this particular award has great meaning for our community. We have inaugurated the Colorado Beautification Award to recognize the outstanding efforts of our citizens who provide this island community with its memorable elegance, its visual refreshment - in short, some of the most beautiful gardens we’ve seen anywhere in the world!
As you all know, Colorado frequently plays host to presidents and dignitaries, and not a few celebrities, officials, men and women of the Armed Forces, America’s Cup racers, and other fascinating people from around the world. As they travel our small-town streets, gazing at the mansions, the Victorians, and the cozy cottages, one of the most commonly heard remarks is,“Oh, look at that beautiful garden!”The world has come to our doorstep and appreciates what it sees. We felt it was time to honor our next-door neighbors for the hours, thought, expense, and good old-fashioned toil they’re invested to make our island community a blooming paradise.
This choice was not an easy one for our judges to make, as they’ll be glad to tell you, but after much study and consideration, our judges have named Brian and Andrea Applegate of 555“B”Avenue as our first recipients of the Colorado Beautification Award. If you’ve driven or walked by the Applegate home, you know that they have not been content to keep their roses, wisteria vines, flowering plums and exotic annuals well-tended inside the walls of their classic cottage garden. For the passersby who might feel shy about peeking through the arched trellis for a glimpse, the Applegate have extended this floral profusion outside their garden walls. They’re planted a colorful abundance of roses, shrubs, annuals, and perennials along the sidewalks of their corner lot,swhereseveryone can enjoy them.
Mr. and Mrs. Applegate, if you’ll step up here please... I am honored to present you with this plaque which pays tribute to your selfless toil and investment. You have truly beautified our community, and you richly deserve the first Colorado Beautification Award!
(She presents the plaque, steps aside, and joins the applause for the beaming couple.)
ACCEPTANCE SPEECH
The key to a successful acceptance speech is to be brief, especially if other people are receiving awards or honors after you. The dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov once accepted an award for actress Marlene Dietrich. When he asked her what he should say, she told him,“Take the thing, look at it, thank them, and go. That’s it! They don’t have time to listen anyway.”This is extreme - but good - advice. You want to let the audience know that you sincerely appreciate the honor without wasting too much of their time.
Be sure to credit other people who helped you achieve what you are being honored for, but keep the list short and meaningful. The help might have been direct (such as co-workers contributing to a project) or indirect (such as your family not complaining about the extra time you spent on the project rather than with them).
Avoid being overly effusive. You’ll usually want to avoid phrases like“greatest day of my life”or“best thing that has ever happened to me.”These tend to sound insincere. Express sincerely what the honor means to you, limiting the use of superlatives. Temper your enthusiasm with humility.
Elie Wiesel spent most of his adult life tracking down Nazi war criminals, and when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, he began his acceptance speech with the following paragraphs.
Example: Acceptance Speech
Nobel Peace Prize
By Elie Wiesel
It is with a profound sense of humility that I accept the honor you have chosen to bestow upon me. I know your choice transcends me. This both frightens and pleases me. It frightens me because I wonder: Do I have the right to represent the multitudes who have perished? Do I have the right to accept this great honor on their behalf? I do not. That would be presumptuous. No one may speak for the dead, no one may interpret their mutilated dreams and visions.
It pleases me because I may say that this honor belongs to all the survivors and their children, and through us, to the Jewish people with whose destiny I have always identified.
This introduction by Wiesel to his acceptance speech is so effective that he almost could have stopped right there.
The acceptance speech given by the couple who won the garden contest is a model of graciousness. Notice how they thank people who’ve helped them along the way and share the joy they experience as gardeners, rather than focusing on their own talents or accomplishments.
Example: Acceptance Speech
Coronado Beautification Award
By Mr. Brian Applegate & Mrs. Andrea Applegate
Mr. Brian Applegate:
Thank you, Mayor Herron, friends, judges of the committee. My wife and I are quite touched by this honor, considering the many beautiful homes and gardens that cover this island. It has always been our joy to fill our garden with new plants, and things just kept expanding, until I believe we have finally run out of room for more. If our joy brings pleasure to others, then so much the better. Andrea, would you like to add a word?
Mrs. Andrea Applegate:
I would just like to thank our many friends who have given us cuttings from their own gardens; our children, who have endured our passion for pulling weeds and digging in the manure every spring; my mother, who taught me how to prune a rose; and the committee for bestowing this honor upon us. We’ve just been doing what we love to do, and we’re glad you’ve enjoyed it, too. Thank you all.
Example: Acceptance Speech
The Nobel Prize for Literature
By William Faulkner
I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work - a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit, something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand hereswheresI am standing.
Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There are only the questions: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.
He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving none of the heart but of the glands.
Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
KEYNOTE SPEECH
The keynote speech is intended to make participants feel comfortable. As the presenter of the keynote speech, you represent the people who organized the event. What you say helps set the tone for the entire event.
While limiting your speech to between three and five minutes, be sure to include vital information, such as information about the organization or event, about the people being welcomed, about the location of important facilities (if needed), and about what the audience can expect from the rest of the event. If you think your audience has other pressing questions or concerns that may keep them from paying attention to or enjoying the programs that follow, it’s a good idea to address these points at the beginning. On the other hand, you don’t want to spend five minutes pointing out the location of the restrooms and the procedure for getting a lunch ticket.
In the following keynote speech, the speaker starts on a high note: pointing out the growth and importance of telecommuting, which is the subject of the conference. The speaker goes on to describe some highlights of the conference and the organization behind it. Notice how the speaker refers listeners to an information packer that contains all the details they’ll need without spending any valuable time going over the details.
Example: Keynote Speech
National Conference of the Telecommuting
Advisory Council
By Laine Downs
Good morning and welcome to the tenth National Conference of the Telecommuting Advisory Council. We are glad to see so many of you here today, proving what we have known since our inception in 1987: that telecommuting is a viable and important work style which has grown tremendously in recent years, largely due to your efforts. Many of you are responsible for implementing telecommuting programs at your companies; others among you are responsible for the government programs that are funding community telecasters throughout the nation; and still others among you are businesspeople who recognize the economic bonus telecommuting can offer, not only to the telecommunications industry, but to community businesses that benefit as workers stay closer to home.
Our purpose this weekend is to provide you with the most current information available about advances in the U.S. telecommuting sector. We have scheduled important forums throughout the conference covering the economic, environmental, social, technological, and legislative issues related to the telecommuting workforce. On Saturday morning, we’re offering a special workshop on“How to Implement a Pilot Telecommuting Program”and I’m told that there are a few spaces left, so if you’re interested, please head over to the registration table in the lobby as soon as we’re finished here.
When you came in you received a packet of information about the conference; inside you’ll find a complete schedule of conference events and a detailed map of the hotel, which will show youswheresevery event is being held. If you need more information or if you wish to change or add to your workshop registrations, our staff will be glad to help you after this morning’s session.
As you know, the Telecommuting Advisory Council began as a grass-roots organization and we have grown phenomenally, gaining our nonprofit status in 1993 and expanding to encompass regional chapters in Arizona, Texas, Colorado, New Jersey, and Oregon, with city chapters in San Diego, Los Angeles and Oranges County, Sacramento, Atlanta, Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago, and of course, our national headquarters in Washington, D.C. Were proud to announce the formation of our International/European Community Telework / Telematics Forum or ECTF, which you’ll be hearing more about later.
The Telecommuting Advisory Council has also established a presence on the World Wide Web, our newsletter is growing every month, and our quarterly audio conferences have met with enthusiastic approval from our membership. We expect more of the same in the next ten years as larger numbers of the working population discover the benefits of telecommuting and as employers and community governments discover the economic, qualitative, and environmental benefits of allowing workers to telecommute.
We’re very excited about being at the forefront of this new development, and we know that by the end of this weekend, you will leave our conference not only with new friends and associates who can support your efforts in the telecommuting field but also with new information, ideas, and skills gained from the distinguished faculty and panel representatives we’ve been able to assemble. So, again, I welcome you, and look forward to seeing all of you at our breakfast forum on Sunday.
EULOGY
One milestone at which you may be asked to speak is funeral. Here are a few things to remember if you are asked to give a eulogy, a tribute delivered at a funeral service.
●Talk to other friends and family; find out what they think is important to say.●Emphasize the positive aspects of the deceased’s life, but again, be realistic.●Keep it short. Avoid using poems or long quotes, unless requested by the family. The audience wants to hear about the person being eulogized, not the wisdom of somebody else.
Senator Edward Kennedy delivered a eulogy at the funeral of his brother, Senator Robert Kennedy. He ended with the following words.
Example: Eulogy
Funeral of Robert Kennedy
By Edward Kennedy
Those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today pray that what he was to us, and what he wished for others, will some day come to pass for all the world.
As he said many times, in many parts of this nation, to those he touches and who sought to touch him:“Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say, why not.”
Obviously, words of eulogy as fitting as these were no doubt prepared with great care before the speech.
When you deliver a eulogy, you should mention-indeed, linger over - the unique achievements of the person to whom you are paying tribute and, of course, express a sense of loss.
At the funeral of former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy in 1994, Senator Edward Kennedy remembered his sister-in-law in the following way.
Example: Eulogy
Funeral of Jacqueline Kennedy
By Edward Kennedy
She was a blessing to us and to the nation, and a lesson to the world on how to do things right, how to be a mother, how to appreciate history, how to be courageous.
No one else looked like her, spoke like her, wrote like her, or was so original in the way she did things.
Finally, turn to the living, and encourage them to transcend their sorrow and sense of loss and feel instead gratitude that the dead person had once been alive among them. In eulogizing his sister, Diana, the Princess of Wales, Earl Spencer affirmed in the following way.
Example: Eulogy
Funeral of Diana
By Earl Spencer
Today is our chance to say thank you for the way you brightened our lives, even though God granted you but half a life. We will all feel cheated, always, that you were taken from us so young, and yet we must learn to be grateful that you came along at all.
