A commemorative speech honors a person, a group, an event, a place or an idea on an occasion set aside for it: a dinner, a toast, an award, an anniversary, the dedication of a building or a memorial. It doesn't mainly inform or argue. It praises, and it tells the room why the subject matters to them now. The most common kind is the tribute speech: a few minutes on one person, built on two or three qualities and the stories that prove them.
The occasion tells you which one you're writing. A tribute fits a dinner, an award or a class assignment, and its subject is often alive and in the room. A toast fits any raised glass and is over in a minute. A eulogy belongs to a funeral or memorial service, where comfort matters as much as praise; for that, start with these eulogy examples.
Kinds of commemorative speeches
| Kind | Occasion | Typical length | Its job |
|---|---|---|---|
| KindTribute | OccasionA birthday, a dinner in someone's honor, a class assignment | Typical length2–5 minutes | Its jobShow what makes one person or group admirable, through stories |
| KindToast | OccasionAn anniversary, a launch, any raised glass | Typical lengthUnder a minute | Its jobOne idea, one story at most, and a line to drink to |
| KindAward presentation | OccasionA banquet or a ceremony | Typical length1–3 minutes | Its jobSay what the award honors and why this winner earned it, then hand over |
| KindAnniversary | OccasionAn organization's milestone, a historic date | Typical length3–10 minutes | Its jobConnect what happened then to the people here now |
| KindDedication | OccasionA building, a room, a monument, a plaque | Typical length2–5 minutes | Its jobSay whom the place honors and what it is for |
| KindMemorial | OccasionMemorial Day, the anniversary of a loss | Typical length3–10 minutes | Its jobHonor those who died, then turn to what the living owe them |
| KindEulogy | OccasionA funeral or memorial service | Typical length3–5 minutes | Its jobA portrait of one person, for the people who loved them. See eulogy examples |
The form is old. Aristotle sorted speeches into three kinds by their audience, and in W. Rhys Roberts's translation of the Rhetoric the third is “the ceremonial oratory of display,” which “either praises or censures somebody” and is concerned chiefly with the present. Rhetoricians call it epideictic. A commemorative speech is its praising half.
How to write a tribute speech
The same five parts carry a toast, a dedication or a memorial address. What changes is the length of each part and the ritual at the end.
Tribute speech outline · about 3 minutes
OPENING (20–30 seconds)
Who you are, and how you know them
Who or what we are honoring, and why today
QUALITY ONE (45–60 seconds)
Name it in one sentence
One story that proves it: a place, a time, something someone said
QUALITY TWO (45–60 seconds)
Name it, then the story
WHAT IT ASKS OF US (20–30 seconds)
What the honoree's example means for the people in this room
CLOSE (10–15 seconds)
The ritual: raise a glass, cut the ribbon, applaud, keep a silence
End on the name- Open with who, what and why today
In the first few sentences, say who you are, whom or what the room is honoring, and why now. Late arrivals, and guests who know the honoree from only one corner of their life, need the frame before the stories.
- Choose two or three qualities
The room already knows the job titles and the dates. Ask the people closest to the honoree which word they would use, and pick the qualities that come up twice. If you've saved their messages as notes, attach them to the Strokes Assistant and ask which qualities come up more than once, and which story best shows each.
- Prove each quality with one story
A place, a time and a line someone said. This is show, don't tell at a lectern: “he made me sweep the shop for a Saturday” says fair, and “he was very fair” says almost nothing.
- Turn from them to us
Near the end, say what the honoree's example asks of the people listening. It can be small. Without the turn, praise can sound like a list; with it, the room has something to carry out the door.
- End on the ritual and the name, then time it
Close with the raised glass, the ribbon, the applause or the silence, and make the name your last words; check how to pronounce it first. At about 130 words a minute, two minutes is roughly 260 words and five minutes about 650. Read it aloud with a timer and cut the weakest story whole.
Commemorative speech examples
Four original speeches; the people, places and organizations are invented. Borrow the shapes and fill them with true stories about your own honoree. The room knew that person, and a borrowed story rings false.
A tribute to a person, for a class assignment
My grandfather, Arturo Medina, has fixed shoes in the same storefront in Pueblo, Colorado, since 1971. The sign used to say MEDINA SHOE REPAIR, but the S fell off before I was born, so for my whole life it has said MEDINA HOE REPAIR. He refuses to fix it. He taught me two things in that shop: patience, and how to charge people fairly.
First, patience. The summer I was ten, the first thing he taught me wasn't stitching. It was waiting. Glue has to sit before you press the new sole on, and he made me watch the clock until it was time. “Rush it,” he said, “and the customer comes back in a week, and the second time they don't say hello.” Fifty-five years in, his customers still come back. They all say hello.
Second, fairness. At twelve, I wrecked my sneakers skateboarding and brought them to him expecting a favor. He fixed them in ten minutes and charged me one Saturday of sweeping. I was furious. It took me years to see it was the fairest bill I've ever been handed. He charges what the work is worth, to everybody, including his own grandchild.
So when I say I admire my grandfather, I mean I admire someone who believes things are worth fixing properly and people are worth being straight with. I'm trying to work that way. Most days I'm still rushing the glue.
If you're ever in Pueblo and a heel comes loose, find the sign that says HOE REPAIR and ask for Arturo. He'll make you wait. It'll be worth it.
Why it works. Two qualities, each proved by a story only a grandchild could tell. Admitting she hasn't mastered either keeps the praise honest, and the last line calls back to the sign, so the speech ends on a laugh and his name.
Presenting an award
Good evening. Every year the Harbor County Literacy Council gives one award, Tutor of the Year, to the volunteer who has done the most for the adults who come to us to learn to read. Usually the committee argues about it for a month. This year it took one meeting.
Our winner has tutored on Tuesday nights for nine years, in a back room of the Fairview library with no windows and a heater that clanks. In that time, eleven adults have worked with this tutor from their first lesson until they could read a newspaper on their own.
One of them is here tonight. Last spring, Marisol Vega read a bedtime story to her granddaughter for the first time. When I asked her what made the difference, she said, “He never once looked at the clock.”
The award is a plaque, a check for five hundred dollars that he will almost certainly give straight back to us, and our thanks for proving that a room with no windows can change eleven lives.
Please welcome this year's Tutor of the Year: Dennis Okafor.
Why it works. A presenter has three jobs: say what the award honors, show why this winner earned it, and get out of the way. The proof comes from a learner's mouth, not the presenter's opinion, and the name comes last, which keeps the room listening until the winner's acceptance speech.
An anniversary toast
[Taps a glass.] Twenty-five years ago this week, Ada rang up a paperback for me out of a shoebox of receipts, and when I got home I found a note inside it, in pencil: “Save this for a rainy day. F.” It rained on Thursday. I was back on Friday.
I'm Hannah Liu, and that note is one of forty-one I've kept since. If you've ever found one of Frank's notes in a book you bought here, raise your glass now. [Glasses go up across the room.] That's what this shop has been doing for twenty-five years.
A town is lucky to have a bookshop. It's luckier to have one that knows what you'll want to read before you do.
So keep them up. To Frank, to Ada, and to the next twenty-five years of Kettle & Quill.
Why it works. It opens on one remembered act, a pencil note in the first book the speaker bought there, so Frank's habit arrives as a story rather than a compliment. Then it turns that act toward the room: everyone who has found a note raises a glass, and the guests can see how far the habit has reached. A toast has room for one image, and this one picks the notes over the shop's history. The count makes the praise checkable, and the last line tells people exactly when to drink. For toasts at weddings, by role, see the wedding speech template.
Memorial Day remarks
Good morning. On the stone behind me are forty-three names. Each belonged to someone from this town who went into the service and didn't come home. That's who today is for.
I want to tell you about one of them, because forty-three is a number, and he was not.
Walter Brandt grew up on Mill Road. He worked at the feed store and played third base for the town team, and in the summer of 1944 he wrote his mother a letter his niece still keeps in a kitchen drawer. Most of it is about the weather and the food. At the end he asks whether the team made the county finals, and whether anybody is keeping his glove oiled.
He was twenty. He never read her answer.
Every name on that stone has a letter like that somewhere, or a glove, or a story told at a kitchen table. Some of those stories are standing in this crowd. Some are gone, with the people who carried them.
So here is what I'd ask of all of us. Find one name. Learn one story. Tell it to someone younger than you, so the stone stays a list of people, not only a list of names.
In a moment the Scouts will read all forty-three names aloud, and then we'll keep a minute of silence. Let's begin with the one I just told you about: Walter Brandt.
Why it works. It says plainly whom the day honors, then turns a number into one person with a feed store, a glove and a letter. The request to the living is small and personal, not political, and the speech hands off to the ritual on a name.
Famous commemorative speeches
These four are in the public domain. Each is worth studying for one move.
Lincoln dedicates a cemetery, 1863
“We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.”
“The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.”
In about two minutes Lincoln runs the whole pattern: the occasion named plainly, the dead honored by what they did, the speaker's words set below their deed, and the turn to the living, who must take up “the unfinished work.” The full text and a close reading are in our post on famous speeches in history.
Frederick Douglass praises Lincoln honestly, 1876
“Truth is proper and beautiful at all times and in all places…”
“Abraham Lincoln was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our man or our model.”
“Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.”
Douglass spoke eleven years to the day after Lincoln was shot, at a monument paid for by African Americans, with President Ulysses S. Grant among the guests. He promises the truth and keeps the promise, naming Lincoln's limits from the point of view of the people who funded the statue before measuring him against his own time. A tribute that admits the flaws can be easier to believe.
Mark Twain toasts the babies, 1879
The toast: “The Babies.—As they comfort us in our sorrows, let us not forget them in our festivities.”
“We have not all had the good fortune to be ladies. We have not all been generals, or poets, or statesmen; but when the toast works down to the babies, we stand on common ground.”
Twain starts from what every guest at a general's banquet shares and ends on the guest of honor as a baby, trying “to get his big toe into his mouth”: “if the child is but a prophecy of the man, there are mighty few who will doubt that he succeeded.” Humor fits a commemorative speech when everyone is in on it and it lands, affectionately, on the honoree.
Ronald Reagan speaks to the Rangers, 1984
“Two hundred and twenty-five came here. After 2 days of fighting, only 90 could still bear arms.”
“These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc. These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end a war.”
“Forty summers have passed since the battle that you fought here.”
The veterans being honored sat in front of him, and Reagan talked to them, not about them. Two numbers come before the praise, and the praise arrives in a repeated frame, anaphora in the catalog of rhetorical devices, each sentence wider than the last: the cliffs, a continent, a war. “Forty summers” joins then to now in two words.
Mistakes that sink a tribute
- The résumé. Jobs, dates and titles the room already knows. One line of facts in the opening is enough.
- Superlatives with no proof. “The kindest person who ever lived” is a claim nobody can picture. One story about one kind act is a picture everybody can.
- A speech about the speaker. Count the times you say “I” and the times you say the honoree's name. If “I” wins, rewrite.
- Jokes the room can't share. Inside jokes leave most of the audience outside, and teasing belongs at a roast. If a story needs explaining, cut it.
- The wrong occasion. Memorial Day honors those who died in service; Veterans Day, in November, honors everyone who served. A Memorial Day speech that only thanks the living veterans in the crowd has missed the day.
If the occasion is a funeral, the rules shift toward comfort: start with how to write a eulogy or the eulogy template. For a colleague's last day, these retirement speech examples fit better.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between a tribute, a toast and a eulogy?
The occasion. A tribute honors someone, often living, at a dinner, an award or a class assignment, and runs two to five minutes. A toast is a short tribute that ends with a raised glass, usually in under a minute. A eulogy is given at a funeral or memorial service, so it has to comfort as well as praise. All three use qualities, stories and a closing line.
How long should a tribute speech be?
Two to five minutes for most occasions, roughly 260 to 650 words at about 130 words a minute. A toast should take under a minute and an award presentation one to three. Ask the organizer for your slot and finish a little under it.
Can a commemorative speech be funny?
Yes, if the humor is shared and kind. Mark Twain's toast to the babies, given at a banquet for General Grant, ends on a joke about Grant as an infant, and the joke is a compliment. Keep jokes to things the whole room recognizes, save teasing for a roast, and end warmly.
