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Writing a Memorable Graduation Speech: Your Cheatsheet
Author:
Samantha Williams
Apr 1, 2025
8 min
Table of contents
Nail Your Grad Speech: Tips, Ideas & Mistakes to Avoid
Delivering an impactful graduation speech is far from a walk in the park. You have to combat stage fright, for one. Your speech also better not bore your audience, too!
Writing a solid graduation speech draft is key to overcoming these and other challenges. Having a battle plan will calm your nerves, all while ensuring you’ll reach your objective: inspiring graduates.
In this guide on writing a graduation speech, you’ll discover:
- Graduation speech ideas for the introduction and conclusion
- How to choose themes for graduation speeches that leave a lasting impression
- Common mistakes to avoid
- Expert tips on making the speech unforgettable
What Makes for a Good Graduation Speech?
An impactful graduation speech for students takes the audience on a journey. That journey has to revolve around a specific theme — a message or a life lesson you want to impart to the audience, if you will. Here are three strong, relatable theme examples:
- Paving your own path in life isn’t easy, but it’s worth it.
- Instead of settling for the average, strive for the exceptional.
- Mistakes aren’t something to be ashamed of — they’re a learning opportunity.
Besides an inspiring message that grounds the whole narrative, great speeches also have these characteristics in common:
- A powerful hook that grabs the audience’s attention from the first word
- A good balance between emotion and humor that lies within your zone of comfort
- An authentic narrative that revolves around your personal story or a message you truly believe in
- No overused clichés or messages
Start with a Graduation Speech Outline
What should your graduation speech include? Here’s your blueprint:
- Introduction: greeting, hook, brief introduction of your message
- Look back: reflections on shared experiences and lessons learned
- Look ahead: forward-looking reflections and/or advice for the audience
- Thanks: gratitude to the key people
- Conclusion: your message reiterated, call to action, congratulations to the graduates
Now, how long should a graduation speech be? It’s best to discuss your time constraints with the graduation ceremony’s organizers. That said, a typical speech is 10 to 20 minutes long. At an average speaking rate of 120 words per minute, this means your draft should be around 1,200 to 2,400 words long.
A Word About Graduation Speech Introduction
Your introduction will set the tone for the rest of the speech. Open with a powerful introduction, and your audience will hang onto your every word after it. Fail to do so, and it’ll be really tough to get their attention back.
So, give your introduction extra thought. Here’s what to say in a graduation speech introduction to capture the audience’s attention:
- Open with a powerful quote that underscores your message
- Describe an anecdote from your life
- Start with a joke — but make sure it’s a good one, or you’ll only make yourself and your audience cringe
- Pose a thought-provoking question
How to Start a Graduation Speech: Expert Tips
As we outlined in the graduation speech format above, an introduction typically consists of:
- Greeting the audience
- Grabbing the audience’s attention with a hook
- Stating the theme — i.e., the key message of your speech
- Transitioning to the main body of your speech
What should a graduation speech include? The outline is typically a simple, five-part blueprint consisting of:
- Introduction
- Look back
- Look ahead
- Thanks
- Conclusion
That said, it’s a general graduation speech outline. Expectations from your speech may depend on the audience, the ceremony’s context, and your school’s guidelines. So, discuss your speech with the organizers if in doubt.
Now, how do you begin your graduation speech with a powerful introduction? Here are our experts’ three tips:
- Make it personal: people prefer authentic stories instead of generic stats.
- Lighten the mood with a joke if appropriate.
- Avoid clichés like “the real world,” “leaving something behind,” or “courage.”
3 Mistakes to Avoid in the Introduction
Now that we’ve covered what to write in a graduation speech, let’s break down three common pitfalls that you may want to keep in mind when you think about how to start a commencement speech:
- Using humor when you’re uncomfortable with it. Open a graduation speech with another hook if you’re not one to joke a lot in real life.
- Embellishing your language. Strive to speak the way you actually talk in real life (without diverting into a too-informal area, of course).
- Setting the wrong tone. Make sure your introduction is tonally the same as the speech itself: humorous, sentimental, or inspirational.
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How to End a Graduation Speech: 4 Expert Tips
Before you start concluding your speech, express gratitude to everyone who helped you in your academic journey. Make sure you don’t forget anyone, or you risk making things awkward between you.
With that done, here’s how to write a high school graduation speech conclusion:
- Reiterate your main message (you should also pepper allusions to it throughout the look back and look ahead parts, by the way)
- Use a quote that echoes your message or add a touch of humor (if appropriate)
- Inspire the audience with a powerful call to action
- Don’t forget to congratulate the graduates!
The call to action deserves your particular attention. To write a good one, make sure it ties well into your theme and speaks to your audience. At the same time, remain concise and clear — you don’t want your audience to lose track of what exactly you want them to do!
How to Close a Graduation Speech: 3 Pitfalls to Avoid
To close on a strong note, avoid these three common mistakes when finishing the speech:
- Drawing it out for too long. Remember the answer to the question, “How long should a commencement speech be?” Keep your conclusion under 10-15% of the total length.
- Rushing through the conclusion. On the flip side, if you spend too much on the body of the speech, you may end up rushing through the conclusion. That’s why it’s crucial to practice and adjust the pacing.
- Setting the wrong tone. Graduation speeches should end on an enthusiastic, positive note. So, use inspiring, energetic vocabulary and tone of voice.
In Closing: How to Make a Graduation Speech Impactful
Before we part ways, WritePapers’ writers have four extra tips for writing an impactful graduation speech:
- Don’t make it too long. The shorter your speech is, the better — at least, in most cases. The optimal speech length is 12 minutes; if you venture into the 20-ish minute territory, keeping your audience’s attention becomes a lot harder.
- Acknowledge the diversity of your audience. Your audience isn’t a monolith: it includes students who passed exams with flying colors and by the skin of their teeth. So, go through your graduation speech ideas with all of them in mind, from jocks and nerds to athletes and theater kids.
- Practice the speech — and edit as you go. As you read it out loud, you’ll be able to pinpoint unintentional tongue twisters and awkward phrases or sentence structures. Pay attention to the speech’s pacing. Practice in front of friends to avoid stage fright.
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To write an impactful graduation speech:
- Consider your audience and acknowledge its diversity in the speech
- Choose a theme — a key message — that resonates with your audience
- Open with a powerful hook
- Reflect on the shared past experiences after the introduction
- Express gratitude to everyone who helped you navigate the academic journey
- Avoid clichés about leaving something behind or going into the real world
If you’re limited in the amount of time you can dedicate to your graduation speech, here are five ideas you can focus on:
- Embracing change can help propel personal growth
- Small choices can bring on huge changes
- Some lessons we learned didn’t come from textbooks (e.g., kindness, teamwork)
- A shift in perspective can turn challenges into opportunities
- Diplomas are important, but they’re not everything
A graduation speech consists of five key parts:
- Introduction: greeting, hook, and key message, with a transition to the rest of the speech
- Look back: past experiences relevant to the message
- Look ahead: forward-looking, inspirational part of the speech
- Thanks: gratitude to teachers, parents, classmates, mentors, etc.
- Conclusion: reiterated key message, relevant quote or joke (if appropriate), call to action, congratulations
Your graduation speech should revolve around a clear, crystallized theme — the key message you want your audience to leave with. This theme can revolve around anything from the power of perseverance to the importance of making mistakes.
Here are five ideas for graduation speech themes:
- Overcoming obstacles
- Power of kindness
- Making a positive impact
- True grit and tenacity
- Focusing on the why, not the how
