"Congratulations. After four years of hard work, you-or your son or daughter, or grandson or granddaughter, or neighbor or niece, or other sort of ramen eater-are graduating from college. It wasn't easy. It was probably also very expensive. You may have thought, I'm not sure I will make it. I thought that too. And I remembered that feeling when I dropped in, last night, for late-night custard at Famous Local Diner With Not-So-Secret Custard. But I did make it, and so did you. And here we are together, having made it. The sun is shining, and the rest of your lives are ahead of you."
"That's the structure and message of a commencement speech. An accomplished and maybe-famous person is probably giving a similar address right now to a sea of graduation caps spread across a green lawn and under blue skies. All of those hardworking graduates will probably forget the content of the address by tomorrow, if not earlier-and that's fine. A good commencement speech is not aimed at posterity, proffered to everyone for all time. Instead, it is a temporary moment in which a speaker brings a community together in the moment they share together, and which evaporates immediately thereafter."
"Dispensing memorable advice is "good in concept," David Murray, who runs the Professional Speechwriters Association, told me. But it's a high-wire act that works on vanishingly rare occasions. Think Steve Jobs at Stanford ( "Stay hungry, stay foolish"), David Foster Wallace at Kenyon ( "This Is Water"), Toni Morrison at Wellesley ( "True adulthood""), or John F. Kennedy at American University ( "Not merely peace in our time but peace for all time"). But if the speaker isn't Morrison (who among us has such a way with words?), these speeches are best when they are disposable."
A graduation celebration can be framed as a shared achievement after years of hard work and expense. The message emphasizes that the future remains ahead and that doubt is common before success. Commencement speeches are structured to bring a community together in the present rather than to be preserved for posterity. Graduates may forget the content quickly, which is acceptable. Memorable advice is rare and depends on exceptional speakers, with examples of famous commencement remarks. For most speakers, the speeches work best when they are disposable, serving the immediate ritual and collective experience.
Read at The Atlantic
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