In all honesty, being a maid of honour belongs on your CV or Linkedin. It is a full time job replete with responsibilities, nuanced soft skills, and superior organisational capacities! And the chance to make a beautiful, impactful maid of honour speech is not only your crowning glory for the work you’ve put in but is a chance for you to celebrate your favourite person around!
You are not only the maid of honour - you’re going to be the maid of a good time after you’ve read through our winning tips!
7 Ways to Rock the Maid of Honour Speech
1. Emphasise the Journey
Every friendship, like every relationship, is a journey. It is a story crammed with memorable hijinks, touching heart to hearts, and outrageous adventures. Paint a picture of you and the bride’s inimitable friendship. You want all of the guests to have a flavor of how your relationship with one another has shaped your life.
2. Show and Tell
Doubtless you have reams of amazing accolades to bestow upon your friend. She is the light of your life and it’s admittedly hard to distil your feelings towards her into a few minutes. You want to construct a well-fleshed out portrait of her, paying heed to her various attributes. Choose a story or two that best highlights her most dominant characteristics, whether that be compassion, playfulness, spontaneity, loyalty, or something in between. It is fine to rattle off a few other qualities for brevity’s sake but ensure you are demonstrating her most special qualities, not just reading them off the page like they’re a laundry list.
3. Humour and Sentimentality Make a Winning Pair
You don’t need to commit to one style in your speech. Keep the crowd entranced with some well-timed jokes and jibes and throw in some saccharine sweet moments, too. Pathos is more than welcome for a speech of this gravity, but so is some lighthearted glee. Don’t feel that your speech has to have a consistent, narrowly defined ‘tone’.
4. Provide a Greatest Hits Run Down
If you are stumped on how to create a beautiful speech, try and focus on the bride’s proudest achievements and really play them up. You could mention a few that are worthy of a more sustained treatment and emphasise your pride in all she has accomplished.
5. Pay Heed to Her Spouse
A joke, a roast, a heartfelt comment - go for whatever best captures your relationship with her new spouse. But ensure you leave space for a few words on who he is, how you met him, and what effect he has had on your friend.
6. Find a Symbol and Weave it Into the Speech
Maybe the bride is notoriously clumsy, or addicted to a certain shade of lipstick or film. Find something quirky about her and weave it into the speech. Perhaps include it in an anecdote that highlights her unique self, and then end the speech with another reference to the symbol. This technique is called a ‘callback’ and is integral to stand-up comedy. It works effectively in a wedding speech and is a clever way to hang up the mic.
7. Get Creative
The maid of honour speech can afford to break tradition (if that’s your style, of course). Create a poem, grab a ukulele and sing a song or write one of your own, create a slideshow of hilarious photos and videos, or create a PowerPoint of your friendship’s most enduring moments. Granted, this will take more work but will also have the maximum impact.
Our Favourite Maid of Honour Speech Examples
This maid of honour is the definition of relatable. She is poised, gracious, and down to earth. She recalls special memories that her and her friend shared during her college and she walks the guests through the story of the couple’s blossoming romance.
This maid of honour is sassy, cheeky, and endearing. She reads out the actual ‘steps’ of a maid of honour speech that she cribbed from an advice site online- “Introduce Yourself”, “Don’t Make it About You” - and interjects her own personal anecdotes. This is a great move for the risk takers among us. The payoff is beyond worth it.
This maid of honour turns her speech into a roast - to great effect. The jokes are playful and personalised but never veer into anything hurtful or inappropriate. The speech showcases her and the bride's bond and provides tons of laughs while doing so.
Is the Struggle Real?
We get it, you’re the maid of honour and you already have so much on your plate. And girl, you are doing it all with style, grace, and poise. But if you find yourself staying up late into the night chewing your fingernails and panicking about the upcoming speech, fear not. At Splendid Speeches our life’s work is turning unique stories into Oscar-worthy speeches. Convinced? We’d love to hear from you!