Jittery Best Men Seek Online Help for Ready-Made Toasts

You can find some great resources  to help you prepare for your Best Man duties and delivering you Best Man Wedding Speech

by Greg Bensinger

Make the most of your toast -- wedding speech writers on the Internet offer services for the best man and other speakers who are at a loss for words. (Audrey N. Carpio/CNS)

When the revelry hit a lull at her best friend’s wedding reception last October, maid of honor Janet Korzan knew she had to do something to jump-start the party and she began searching for speeches for the maid of honor.  Drawing from her prepared speech, Korzan, 48, had the groom place his hand atop the bride’s and said, “That’s the last time you’ll see him with the upper hand.” The line was a big winner, Korzan said. “That’s when the party really started rocking.”

Only Korzan didn’t write her speech. Rather, she purchased it on the Internet for $19.95, along with five wedding-day speeches, a guide for public speaking, a bachelorette party “oath of silence” form and a list of 50 quotations and toasts.

Korzan, a realtor in Tucson, Ariz., isn’t the only tongue-tied wedding party member who’s looking for some outside help. Businesses that write speeches for the best man and maids of honor have been sprouting up on the Internet in recent years. And clients are shelling out upward of $300 for a five-minute, customized speech.

Services like ThePerfectToast, WeddingSpeech4u and usa-wedding-speeches sell as many as 200 speeches a month. And their owners say the real windfall comes in June, the most popular month for weddings.

“Now that every detail of a wedding is planned out by a professional, it puts a lot of pressure on the best man or maid of honor to deliver a great speech, so a prepared one can really help increase their comfort,” said Ryan Ringold, 33, the owner of the Michigan-based Ultimate Speeches Online. “People are so scared of public speaking, it’s just a relief to have a professional help.”

Most clients just want the wedding to go off without a hitch. “I tried to put together a nice speech for my brother’s wedding so that he would have some good memories, but it ended up sounding all wrong” said Joe, 31, a Clark, N.J., resident who asked that his last name not be used. So Joe turned to a professional online speechwriter (Fine Wedding Speeches), who crafted a two-minute speech for him. “I knew the speech was good when the maid of honor got up to speak and said, ‘Wow, I feel stupid, I didn’t prepare as much as you did.’ That was nice.”

Like Ringold’s service, many companies provide their clients with a package of fill-in-the-blank wedding speech templates, which are delivered in an e-mail message or in a downloadable pdf format for a one-time fee.

On great-wedding-toasts.com, for instance, a packet of seven different two- and three-minute best man speeches is delivered within seconds of payment. Included are speeches for best men who are married, single, the groom’s best friend or brother or the bride’s brother. In one, the best man is directed to say, “I always wondered why the groom isn’t referred to as the best man ... but I’m sure that [bride's name] could provide us with several theories.”  The speech continues, “Needless to say, I am very much joking. Humor is essential to all good marriages. For example, every time I ask my wife if I’m as handsome as some of the actors on TV, she laughs herself silly for about an hour. Whatever makes her happy, I guess.” Also included are helpful directions like “slow down and warm your tone,” for when the speech becomes more heartfelt.

Other sites have more customizable speech-writing services. Visitors to FigureOfSpeech.co.uk are asked to fill out a form with personal data like the bride and groom’s shared interests and how and where they met. The form also provides space for six separate stories or sentiments about the betrothed.

Some customized speeches are written entirely from scratch. Steve McCardell, 31, who runs the Rochester, Mich.-based YourSpeechwriter.com, writes all of his clients’ speeches without the aide of templates. “I like to start out with something unusual or fascinating about the couple, then I move on to humor and finally something tender at the end,” said McCardell, who gets a handful of wedding speech requests each month. McCardell speaks with his clients directly over the phone before drafting a speech, for which he charges $150 for a three-minute address, including revisions. “You have to hear how they sound, the words they use, so that their speech sounds authentic and true. You’re trying to find this person’s voice; you’re writing it for them, not for you.”

Still, some customers are able to cobble together personal speeches using templates from a service and their own writing skills. About three weeks before his best friend’s wedding late last year, Peter Roy, a 31-year-old bank vice president from Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., was getting nervous about his best man speech, which was to be delivered in front of 350 people. So he ordered a package of addresses from UltimateSpeeches Online and “I kind of cut and pasted it all together from the speeches and I used my own words and details to make it more personal,” said Roy, who incorporated into his final speech an elaborate prank, of his own invention, on the groom. “They both thanked me afterward,” he said, adding, “I don’t think they know I got help.”

Korzan said her newlywed friends were so grateful for her speech, they asked to include a copy of it in their wedding book. “They thought the speech was just great,” Korzan said, “and they think I did it all by myself.”

E-mail: geb2106@columbia.edu