What To Say In a Wedding Toast
Listen to the full episode of Toastcaster Communication with Greg Gazin on what to say in a wedding toast here or find snippets of the best parts below.
During the show, we discuss:
How to include humor in a wedding toastHow to start a wedding toastHow to work with a speechwriter when writing a wedding toastHow long should a wedding toast be, and how many words is 3-5 minutes?What are some of the wedding toast takeaways from the book, “Toast: Short Speeches, Big Impact?”What to say in a wedding toast (rough transcript)What are the basics for how to start and what to say in a wedding toast?
How to give a toast at a wedding
Including jokes in a wedding speech
Tips on how to start a speech at a wedding
You think about toasts, there’s a science behind it, but there’s also a little bit of an art.
And when we think about toasts quite often, I’m sure for most people, the first thing that comes to mind is the wedding, wedding season is coming up or perhaps, maybe a retirement someone’s giving a toast to someone who’s retiring, but there’s also other occasions where you would have.
Oh, sure. I think of birthdays and anniversaries, bat mitzvahs and bar mitzvahs.
I think of promotion ceremonies or award speeches. Those all fall into the toast category, ceremonial speeches, it’s interesting. I guess you could say that they all fit into this one category, which often leads to raising a glass.
Yes, 100%. I liked that a lot.
And it also comes down to the goals too, of the toast where you want to honor the person and honor the event. If you’re doing that with a speech, it’s most likely a toast.
Oh, excellent. That’s a good it’s a good rule of thumb. Of course. I’m thinking when you go on YouTube, what is toasts quite often, you think about, okay, here’s the best man gets up to give a toast to the groom or the toast to the bride and groom and things go terribly wrong. Sometimes they’re telling horror stories and blah, blah, blah. Again, could you maybe just elaborate a little bit more on what the purpose of a toast is?
Sure. I think very often people get a toast confused with a roast, and I think that’s the downfall of too many of those YouTube fails that you see quite often where someone has had too much to drink too little preparation, and they just start letting loose thinking it’s the beginning of their standup career.
And that’s just a recipe for disaster at that point.
So obviously you’ve written many toasts and you’ve heard many toasts when you listen to one and you hear one and you say to yourself, this was a great toast.
What is it that makes for a great toast?
I think a lot of the times, it’s the storytelling that happens within the toast.
If you can find great stories that honor the person that you’re toasting, then you’re going to have a really good speech put together. And what I mean is, telling those favorite stories about the person, when were they there for you in your life? When did they help you out? When did they show courage?
When did they show their best selves?
If you can find a story that tells those qualities of someone, that’s what I know the toast is going to be really good.
That’s interesting because it seems quite often the first thing that people will do is they try to go for that big laugh they do. And it almost always never works for whatever reason.
It’s that one liner that crude, joke they found on the internet or the joke we’ve all heard before. It’s almost always gets like that polite laugh. That, people give just because they know it’s a joke, but it really wasn’t that funny. But yeah, going for a joke right off the bat is almost always a recipe for disaster, unless you’ve, you’re a polished standard comedian, then maybe you can do it pretty well.
But for most people, I would say at least introduce yourself. Tell us who you are, how you’re related to the person that you’re toasting. And then tell us one great story. And that’s a much more effective way to start.
Yeah, I learned the hard way in my younger years, I would get up and I was always told, just tell a joke, warm up the audience.
And I would tell something that would fall. Really flat. But one time I actually had a very good opportunity. I had a friend of mine who was getting married and our connection when we were growing up together was the love of music and the love of records. And so he was in Montreal. I was in Edmonton, Alberta in Western Canada, and I traveled to the wedding and I remember opening up with a huge apology.
And I pulled out this record that I’d picked up at a used record store and it had a chunk taken out of it!
What is the toast writing process like when working with a speechwriter?If someone is asking you to write a toast for them, how do you go about writing one?
How do you write it in such a way or create it in such a way that it doesn’t sound like it was written by somebody else?
is there a typical time for this process?
If someone is asking you to write a toast for them, how do you go about writing one?
So we start with a brainstorming survey. I have a set of questions depending on the occasion for the person to answer.
And these are some of the questions that I mentioned earlier. What are your favorite memories of this person? What have they truly been there for you? What have they made you laugh? When have they really shown who they are in the best way possible? And I send those questions over the person fills out the survey.
And then the speaker sends it back to me and we get on the phone and we talk about the answers in depth to what the person has written. And that helps me hear their voice, hear their intonation, and also just drill down a lot of the answers. And as a result, I’m able to take what they said and take what they wrote and turn it into a toast based on a few structures that I like to use that helps shape the story that they want to give and tell in the toast.
Wow. That’s interesting. So not only do you listen to the answers, you also listen to how they feed you back those answers ’cause that was my next question. Is that, how do you write it in such a way or create it in such a way that it doesn’t sound like it was written by somebody else? Like someone might say that doesn’t sound like me.
We also trade the draft back and forth up to three times. So the person can go in there and edit it and they can change words and phrases around and say, this is how I would say this part, or this is how I would do this part. So it’s a lot more of a partnership rather than me just writing a speech and saying, here you go, give it.
It’s very much a back and forth between the speaker and the client.
I know obviously it depends on how long it takes for people to answer the survey, but how long is there a typical time for this process to take?
If it’s a toast and and it’s five to seven minutes, probably around two weeks. If the speech is longer and requires research, then it’s a month.
That long, or that short dependent on your timeline, I’ve done some and only a few days before, but rush jobs are never too great. But I think an average of two weeks is what I can typically do if pressed for time.
How long should a wedding toast be?How long should a wedding toast be?
How can we calculate the number of words for a wedding toast?
So after all that’s said and done, if someone is looking at the written form, how many words are we looking at roughly?
It depends. The way I calculate it out is the average human takes about 150 words per minute to speak. I will just do the math depending on how long it is they need to do a speech. So for talking to three minute toasts, that’s 450 words, five minute toast is a 750. So that’s how I just give a good ballpark as long as I am plus or minus within 100 words within the time limit. I know that we’re going to hit our mark almost on the dot.
What are some of the key wedding toast takeaways of the book, Toast: Short Speeches, Big Impact?What are some of the key wedding toast takeaways of the book, Toast: Short Speeches, Big Impact?
What are a few key tips or a few key takeaways that you can share from the book.
Obviously you can’t go through everything, but there are a few things that maybe you could pull out just to get people thinking.
If they’re looking at getting into writing their first toast, first, what you want to do is honor the person and honor the event. Second. You want to make sure that you’re telling stories. Third, you want a well-structured speech, even if you’re just going to be speaking for three minutes, having it well-structured is still going to help you immensely fourth, take the time to really think about what you want to say and what you want to write.
And balance the amount of time you’ve written the speech with how much time you need to actually prepare and rehearse it too often, we let preparation and rehearsal fall by the wayside and that’s going to take an otherwise great speech and tank it. So instead you want to make sure that you’re budgeting time in five minutes throughout the day of little moments where you can practice your speech, whether that’s in the car, in the shower.
Before you go to bed, lunchtime, just all those little moments where if you take them and you practice your speech, you’re going to be in a much better spot on the big day than trying to cram it all in at the last minute
is reading a speech. Okay. Or reading your toast, I guess I should say it is. If you have rehearsed it to the point where you don’t need to read it. There’s two people I think of in this scenario, there’s the person who wrote their speech the night before and is just reading it line for line without making any type of eye contact with the audience or doing anything to amplify the sentences on the paper.
I think that might not be the best way to go about it. What I would do instead. Rehearse it so much that your notes are there just as backup, rehearse it so much that you can give the speech as if you didn’t have the notes in front of you. And you’re just using them in case you get lost a little bit. So you want to internalize your speech rather than just read it word for word off the page.
And you want to get your timing down as well, because I know that I remember once being at a wedding where I know there were a number of people that were supposed to give speeches. And I think the first or second person who gave a toast, O M G just, it went on that. It seemed like a Ted talk.
Yeah. Watch out for that.
You want to stick to about five minutes for your toast. Given how many people are speaking at a wedding, keep it at five minutes and no one’s ever going to complain that a speech was to.
