The Lost Art of the Great Speech: How to Write It * How to Deliver It

Chapter Six. The Best of References

In Chapter Five, we discussed six things that a good opening might need to accomplish:

1. establish a common ground between speaker and audience

2. Set the tone for the speech

3. Reinforce or establish the speaker's qualifications

4. Arouse interest in the subject

5. Take advantage of the speaker's "grace period"

6. Segue smoothly into the subject

Then we discussed four of the five categories of speech openings—the novelty opening, the dramatic opening, the humorous opening, and the question opening—leaving the fifth category, reference openings, for a longer discussion in this chapter.

In a reference opening, the reference can be to any number of things. It often, but not always, has some relation to the speech or the event. A ...