Speeches

How to give a toast

A toast has three parts, in a fixed order: name the moment, tell one thing, raise the glass. It runs a minute or two, it ends with the room doing something together, and almost everything that goes wrong with toasts comes from treating one like a small speech. This page covers the toast you might be asked to give at a birthday, a promotion, an engagement, a farewell, a dinner, or any table where someone hands you the moment. Wedding toasts have their own conventions, covered in their own guides linked below.

A toast is not a short speech

A speech is about its subject, and the room listens. A toast is an instruction to the room, and the room acts. Everything before the raised glass exists to earn that last line, where you tell everyone what they are drinking to and they answer you. Judge every sentence by whether it moves the room toward standing and repeating a line. In a speech, a digression can be the best part. In a toast, it is a delay with a glass going warm in sixty hands.

This also settles who a toast is for. A speech can be addressed to the person it honors. A toast is addressed to the room about the person, until the final line, which turns and speaks to them directly. That turn, from talking about someone to talking to them, is the emotional mechanism of the whole form, and it only works once.

How long it should run

One to two minutes. People speak at roughly 130 to 150 words a minute in a room, so that is 150 to 300 words, which is less than a page and can be held on a card or in memory. The arithmetic behind the words-per-minute figure is worked through in how long should a best man speech be, and it scales down. A toast that passes three minutes has become a speech, which is fine if a speech was wanted, and a known irritation if it wasn't. When in doubt, the host's answer to one question settles it: am I saying a few words, or giving the toast?

Part one: name the moment

One or two sentences. Say why the room is gathered and, if it is not obvious, who you are to the person being toasted. At a retirement, that is the years and the place. At a birthday, the number. At an engagement, the news. Resist the urge to open with a joke you would need to explain; the moment itself is the strongest opening available, and it is already in the room. Then stop naming and start telling.

Part two: tell one thing

One story or one observation, never a list. The commonest toast failure is the inventory, a string of qualities ("generous, funny, always there for us") that could describe anyone and therefore describes no one. One specific story, with a place and a moment and a detail only someone who knows the person could supply, does more than ten adjectives, because the room can check it against the person sitting there and watch it fit.

Pick the story by the occasion's direction. A retirement or farewell looks back, so choose a moment that shows what the person was like to work or live alongside. A birthday looks at the present, so choose something recent and characteristic. An engagement or a new venture looks forward, so choose the moment you first saw the thing everyone is now celebrating. The tests that apply to any story told about a person who is present apply here: nothing that embarrasses them in front of this particular room, and nothing that needs context the room doesn't have.

Part three: raise the glass

Turn to the person, say one plain sentence directly to them, then give the room its instruction: ask them to stand or raise a glass, name what the toast is to, and give them a short line to repeat. Keep the line under ten words, because the room holds it in memory between hearing it and saying it. "To Maria, and the next thirty years" works. A compound sentence does not survive the trip. The mechanics of a closing line, and why endings more often run out than land, are in how to end a wedding speech, and they hold at any table.

The stage business

Getting a room's attention is part of the toast, and it is easier standing. Stand, hold the glass at chest height, and wait. A room notices a standing person with a raised glass within a few seconds, and waiting out the last conversations beats talking over them. Tapping a glass with cutlery works but is loud, risks the glassware, and at larger gatherings sets off answering chimes around the room; a raised glass and patience do the same job. Hold the glass through the toast, because it is the prop that tells everyone what kind of talking this is, and do not drink until the room drinks with you at the end. Practice the final line with the physical movement in it, since the raise, the turn, and the words have to arrive together and this is the part most often fumbled.

The read-aloud test

Say the toast aloud, standing, with a timer, before the day. Mark where you breathe, split any sentence too long for one breath, and rewrite any sentence that can be read two ways out loud so it can only be read one way. A toast is short enough to know almost by heart, which frees your eyes for the room and the person. The longer guide to delivering a speech covers pace, pauses, and hands, and a one-minute toast deserves the same five minutes of practice.

If yours is a wedding

The structure above still holds, but weddings add running order, expected content, and length conventions of their own. Those are covered separately: the order of wedding speeches, how to start one, and the structure guides for the best man, maid of honor, and father of the bride. Wedding anniversaries have their own page, because the span of years changes what the toast is made of.

If the structure is clear but the words won't come

That is the part I do. I write custom speeches and toasts for any occasion, from your own stories, collected through a short questionnaire, delivered as a typeset PDF within 48 hours, with one revision included. There are three complete sample speeches on that page, free to read before you decide anything.