How to think about short cultural speeches

The short forms of cultural speaking are the ones nobody writes about and everybody has to do: the unveiling, the vote of thanks, the dinner toast, the two minutes before a performance, the words at a room opening. Protocol governs them almost entirely.

That is why they look easy and are not. Cultural here means the speaking that belongs to an institution's own life, its dinners, openings and dedications, rather than to politics or law.

This page is about those forms, measured against the best-documented short ceremonial speech in American history: Abraham Lincoln's two minutes at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery at Gettysburg.

What to take away

The five short forms

The benchmark: two minutes at Gettysburg

The dedication on November 19, 1863, is the clearest surviving case of a short form set against a long one. Lincoln was the second speaker. He was preceded on the podium by the famed orator Edward Everett, who spoke to the crowd for two hours, and Lincoln's address followed.

The occasion produced its own response the next day. On November 20, Everett wrote to Lincoln that he would be glad if he could flatter himself that he had come as near to the central idea of the occasion in two hours as Lincoln did in two minutes. That letter is the vote of thanks the form rarely gets on paper: one speaker answering another, specifically, about what was actually said.

The record also shows why this example survived when most did not. The Library of Congress holds two of the five known manuscript copies, the ones Lincoln gave to his private secretaries John Nicolay and John Hay. The other three were written by Lincoln for charitable purposes well after the event. A short speech at a ceremonial peak, by a president, was copied and kept; the ordinary opening in the same week was not.

Two more documented forms: the toast and the unveiling

The toast has written rules where diplomacy is involved. A U.S. State Department protocol guide for diplomats says hosts of diplomatic dinners often offer two toasts: a welcome toast to everyone in the room, usually after the first course, and a toast to the guest of honor at the beginning or end of the dessert course. The speaker rises in place and speaks to the entire room. The person being toasted never drinks to himself or herself, and can answer with a nod or by rising afterwards with a formal response.

The same guide notes that in most countries a guest being toasted remains seated and does not drink to the toast, then replies by standing and toasting the host and hostess, and it tells staff to seek advice at post about local customs. That is the order of names and the cue to stand, written down as rules.

The unveiling has a famous American case, complete with a mishap. The National Park Service chronology of Liberty Island records that the Statue of Liberty was formally unveiled at the dedication ceremony on Bedloe's Island on October 28, 1886. During the ceremony, Bartholdi released the French flag draped across the statue's face prematurely, and guns sounded while people whistled and applauded. President Grover Cleveland formally accepted the statue on behalf of the United States as a gift of friendship from France and saluted Bartholdi as "the greatest man in America today." The acceptance named the maker and the reason, the two obligations an unveiling cannot skip.

Protocol before prose

Each of these forms carries a list of obligations, and the list is the

Write the obligations down before writing a sentence. In a short form there is no room to recover from an omission, and the omission is the thing the room will remember.

Composition under a listening constraint

The vote of thanks is the hardest short form in ordinary use, because it must

A frame might be: the subject the address turned out to be about, the moment that made it land, what the audience should do with it. Two of those three can only be filled live.

Practicing the frame rather than the words makes the form manageable. It is the same principle as the prepared ending in our guide to award speeches.

Repeated sentence shapes do a lot of work at this length, because a listener who cannot look back needs the structure carried in the sound; the encyclopedia entry on isocolon explains the mechanism, and the fuller set is in our guide to rhetorical devices in speeches.

Why almost none of it survives

Short ceremonial remarks are not recorded, not printed and not minuted. What survives is a line in an annual report saying that the room was opened and by whom. That leaves a real gap in the history of institutional speaking: the formal addresses are preserved and the everyday speech of the same institutions is gone.

Two consequences follow for researchers. A surviving example matters more, so describe it fully instead of mining it for a quotation.

The surviving examples skew toward ceremonial peaks. A history built on them will overstate the formality of ordinary institutional life. Both points shape how cultural speeches treats its sources, the same sampling problem that shapes every ceremonial record.

Where a body did keep a run of short remarks, usually in bound proceedings, the run is worth reading as a series. Conventions shift visibly across twenty years of votes of thanks, and that is a real finding about a real institution, which the periodization method in cultural speeches by decade is built to handle.

If you have to give one

Find out the protocol first, from whoever has run the event before. Write the names down and check the order with someone who will be in the room. Draft the obligations as a list, then write the shortest sentence that discharges each one, then put them in an order that ends somewhere.

Aim well under the time you were given. Nobody has ever complained that an unveiling was brief. Read it aloud once to hear where a name is missing, since missing names are invisible on the page and obvious in the mouth.

Common questions

How long should a vote of thanks be?

Shorter than feels polite. Its job is to close the address, not to add to it. Lincoln's dedication remarks at Gettysburg took two minutes by Everett's own count, and they answered a two-hour oration.

Can I write a vote of thanks in advance?

Write the frame in advance and leave the specifics empty. An entirely pre-written response is audible, and it tells the room that the address did not matter.

What if I am asked to speak with no warning?

Name the occasion, name the people, say one specific thing you noticed, stop. That is a complete speech and it takes twenty seconds.

Is it worth archiving these remarks?

Yes, and almost nobody does. A body that keeps a note of who spoke at each opening, and what was said in a sentence, is building the record that its successors will find nowhere else.