• Speech of Introduction
• Award Speech
• Acceptance Speech
• Graduation Speech
• Tribute Speech (Can be to a person, occasion, or monument)
• Eulogy Speech
• After Dinner Speech
• Toast Speech

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmCTQ_mkzHU

Identification

He uses “you” nearly 250 times and “we” 170 times in a 45-minute speech

•  You guys and girls, and young men and women are the reason I’m here.
• I’m really looking forward to talking with you all tonight.
• You heard my dad played football here.
• I thought about what you would want, I thought about what you might need.
• I also thought about what I want to say and what I need to say. Hopefully, we’re both going to be happy on both
• It means you got an education. It means you have more knowledge in a specific subject, vocation. It means you may have more expertise in what your degree is in. But what’s it worth in the job market out there today?
• So, while we’re here, and they’re going to run across the jumbotron, let’s make it a place where we break a sweat. Where we believe, where we enjoy the process of succeeding in the places in ways that we are fashioned to.

Fun fact: Matthew McConaughey is a professor of practice at the Moody College of Communication at the University of Texas at Austin. https://moody.utexas.edu/faculty/matthew-mcconaughey

Magnification is where you make an action larger than life. Notice how Oprah Winfrey elaborates on the action of Rosa Parks and makes it large and heroic.

 

I grew up in the South, and Rosa Parks was a hero to me long before I recognized and understood the power and impact that her life embodied. I remember my father telling me about this colored woman who had refused to give up her seat. And in my child’s mind, I thought, “She must be really big.” I thought she must be at least a hundred feet tall. I imagined her being stalwart and strong and carrying a shield to hold back the white folks.

…So I thank you again, Sister Rosa, for not only confronting the one white man who[se] seat you took, not only confronting the bus driver, not only for confronting the law, but for confronting history, a history that for 400 years said that you were not even worthy of a glance, certainly no consideration. I thank you for not moving.

And in that moment when you resolved to stay in that seat, you reclaimed your humanity, and you gave us all back a piece of our own.

 

Before Mohammad Ali passed, he struggled with tremors. In this eulogy speech, Former President Clinton describes watching him light the Olympic flame. The mere act of walking was a simple thing that was made great by the circumstances.

Finally after all the years that we have been friends, my enduring image of him is like a little reel in three shots: the boxer I thrilled to as a boy, the man I watched take the last steps to light the Olympic Flame when I was president, and I’ll never forget it, I was sitting there in Atlanta, by then we knew each other, by then I felt that I had some sense of what he was living with, and I was still weeping like a baby, seeing his hands shake and his legs shake and knowing by God he was gonna make those last few steps, no matter what it took. The flame would be lit. The fight would be won. The spirit would be affirmed. I knew it would happen.

Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption gave this acceptance speech when winning the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and NonFiction. Notice how his use of narration makes us feel something about his grandmother and then we carry those feelings as he talks about racial justice.

I had a very close relationship with my grandmother. My grandmother was the daughter of people who were enslaved. Her parents were born into slavery in Virginia in the 1840s. She was born in the 1880s, and the only thing that my grandmother insisted that I know about her enslaved father is that he learned to read before emancipation, and that reading is a pathway to survival and success. So I learned to read. I put books and words in my head and in my heart, so that I could get to the places that she needed me to go.

I’m thinking about my grandmother tonight, because she had these qualities about her. She was like lots of African American matriarchs. She was the real force in our family. She was the end of every argument. She was also the beginning of a lot of arguments! She was tough, and she was strong but she was also kind and loving. When I was a little boy, she’d give me these hugs, she’d squeeze me so tightly I could barely breathe. And then she’d see me an hour later and she’d say, “Bryan, do you still feel me hugging you?” And if I said no, she would assault me again!

Did you notice the magnification (the greatness of a simple thing) in learning to read and in hugging?

Did you notice his use of identification by saying, “She was like lots of African American matriarchs?”

Speaking of identification, check out how he uses “we”

We need to change the narrative in this country about race, and poverty. We’re a country that has a difficult time dealing with our shame, our mistakes. We don’t do shame very well in America, and because of that we allow a lot of horrific things to go unaddressed.

Read the whole speech here:

https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/awards-and-prizes/article/67546-is-this-the-greatest-book-award-acceptance-speech-ever.html