Good morning {{first_name|Reader}}.

A note before you read. The Longhand is a new series I'm starting under Own The Watch. It's a place for essays about craft, about permanence, about the things we make that outlast a day.

A piece of that, for me, is the belief that every man should be able to stand up and say something worth hearing. At a wedding, at a funeral, at a retirement, at the dinner table. It's a skill most men were never taught and rarely develop. The Longhand is partly an attempt to change that.

Today's essay is about wedding speeches. More soon.

— Ian

A wedding produces a lot of things. A suit. A ring. A dress. Flowers, a cake, a first dance, a watch if the man reading this has been thinking about one for a long time. Photos that will sit on a shelf for forty years.

It also produces words. The vows. The toasts. The things a father says when he hands off his daughter. The things a best friend says when he stands up with a glass. The things a groom says to his new wife in front of everyone he loves.

Most of what you bought for the day will fade with time. Things will be put away. Dresses will hang in closets, untouched. But the words, if they were any good, will outlast all of it. Fifty years from now, the family will still quote the toast her father gave. Her daughter will borrow a line from it in her own toast one day. The vows will be read again at anniversaries. A granddaughter who never knew the couple when they were young will watch the best man’s speech on a screen somewhere, and she will laugh at the right moments because great writing still lands, even through the static of time.

And so many people spend more time choosing their pocket square than writing what they plan to say.

I’ve spent a good portion of my career writing speeches for people who had to give them. Retirements, ceremonies, transitions, the kinds of moments where someone stands up in front of a room and has to say something meaningful without making a fool of himself. I’ve watched what works and what doesn’t, live, from the back of the room. Weddings are no different. The craft is the same.

The difference between a great toast and a forgettable one usually comes down to whether the speaker understood what the moment was asking of him, and whether he prepared accordingly.

You can tell, within about ninety seconds, which camp someone is in. A bad speech gives itself away fast. Too much chasing the joke. Too much trying to sound like someone he isn’t. Too much inside reference that serves the speaker instead of the audience. The crowd’s laughter gets a little too polite. People start looking at their phones.

A great speech does something different. It doesn’t try to be funny, though it often is, because honesty has its own kind of humor. It gets emotional without putting the emotion on display. It names something true about the couple that everyone in the room recognizes but nobody had articulated. It is short. It ends cleanly, without trailing off or apologizing.

Brevity, specificity, honesty, and a clean landing. Although it sounds so easy, it is almost impossible to do under pressure.

The reason most wedding speeches fail is that many people confuse preparation with rehearsal. They write bullet points on a note card three days before, practice reading them in the mirror twice, and then wonder on the day why the words feel thin in their mouth.

A speech is a small piece of writing. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It has a thesis, meaning a single thing you believe about the person you’re speaking about, and the rest of the speech is evidence for it. If you cannot state, in one sentence, what you are trying to say about your wife, your daughter, your brother, your best friend, you are not ready to give the speech.

And so many people skip this part. Not because they can’t do it, but because nobody ever told them that was the work.

The best way to think about a wedding speech is as something the family keeps.

Fifty years from now, no one will remember the suit or the flowers or the intricacies of what happened that day. But the words, if they were any good, will be the thing the family still quotes. The sentence the bride’s father said about her that her own daughter will repeat one day. The line the groom said to his new wife that she will remember longer than she remembers the rings. The toast the best friend gave that made the whole room go quiet for a second before the laugh came.

Those are real things to make. Worth more than most of what anyone spends money on in a year. And worth treating like they matter.

If you have something coming up and you want to talk about it, just reply to this email. No pitch, no pressure. I’ll tell you honestly whether it’s the kind of project I can help with.

— Ian

(Write back, I read everything)