 Hi everyone, in this video I want to take just a couple minutes to talk to you about some of those speeches that don't fit into the other categories that are not informative or persuasive, but these are speeches for special occasions, for a special purpose. So let's take a few minutes to look at the unique qualities that these present for us as speakers. So our goals for special occasions can vary. To celebrate, to give thanks to market and important occurrences, to entertain, to inspire, all of these things are potential goals for a special occasion speech. So it really just depends on the situation, but we do need to have a clear understanding of what the purpose is and what we're there for. So we need to identify that, first of all, and identify what our goal is. No matter what kind of special occasion it is, though, there are a couple of strategies that are sort of universal for these things. First of all, our goal as a speaker in a special occasion is to magnify whatever the occasion is, whatever that person is. It's not about us, it's about them, so we need to magnify everything about this. We want to amplify emotion in the situation, potentially, if it's an emotion. We could be working to amplify that emotion. We want to work to exceed expectations. We want to promote positivity and goodwill and just magnify all those types of things, and then we want to build the audience's appreciation and admiration toward that subject. We can keep the focus on that that subject and really just push it. We want to magnify all these things even more so than we would in a typical informative persuasive speech. Some other things to keep in mind, we want to identify with the audience. We want to connect with them. We want to establish that connection with them that lets them know I'm one of you. We want to find ways that we can do that, ways that we can connect. So we build familiarity and closeness with the audience. We find a way to find common connection with them, find common points of interest, find common experiences and things so that we build that familiarity and seem like we are one of them, so to speak. And then we create a sense of community as well to build identity and to identify with the audience. We create that sense of community. Again, we're all in this together. We're all one kind of big group here, and so we create that sense of community. A couple of other things, special occasion speeches, keep it short. These are not intended to be really long speeches for the most important, unless you have a specific directive to speak for a longer period of time, keep these short no matter what the occasion. Acknowledge the obvious. You don't have to hide the fact of what you're there for. I mean, you're there for a purpose. You're there for a person. You're there to celebrate an occasion, an event, an idea, whatever. Acknowledge the obvious. Acknowledge what's happening there. Don't try and obscure it from the audience or overlook it. Just be there for what you're there for. Remember, it's not about you. It's not about you. The special occasion speeches are about the occasion, the person, the event, the idea, whatever it is. It's not about you. It's not about how fantastic you are, how smart you are. Keep the focus on whatever the focus is, whatever the purpose is there. Stay positive. No need to go negative here, even if it's, you know, you're giving a eulogy for somebody you don't like. You're talking about somebody you don't really care for. Keep it positive. These are the special occasion speeches. Keep it in the positive realm. Don't go negative with these. Use humor, but use it carefully, right? Understand the occasion, the purpose, the people in the audience, and you can use humor. You can keep it light. You can keep it positive, but do so carefully and understand the type of humor that you're using and use it appropriately. And then finally, special occasion speeches are really a benefit from sincere, confident vocal and physical delivery. So people want to be reassured, they want to be connected with, they want to be sued, they want to, whatever, but it should be sincere and confident in both our vocal and physical delivery. And this is another opportunity, these special occasion speeches. This is an opportunity for you to be creative and elegant with your language. Other speeches may not allow for that. Informative speeches should be pretty straightforward, fairly simple language. First ways of speeches, you're going to use some emotive language, but also balance setting with logic and different things. But special occasion speeches are your chance to break out those different linguistic devices that we've studied, things like metaphor and analogy and just all those alliteration, those types of things. You can be creative, you can be eloquent with your language, you can make it a little more flowery than you might in another type of speech. So use language appropriately, but use it in creative and eloquent ways. If you have questions about speaking for special occasions or any of the principles there, please feel free to email me. I'd be happy to chat with you in that way. And I look forward to hearing from you there. In the meantime, I hope you'll again, consider the different aspects of speaking for a special occasion and how it is significantly different from other types of public speaking and plan accordingly and be the best public speaker that you can.