With after dinner speaking, your audience has a special expectation, that is they expect to be entertained. A good friend once described it as the ultimate and extreme speaking challenge, the bungee jump of speaking circles.



There are other articles that go into the basics of public speaking within this collection, so I will not go over them here. An after dinner speech is not the time to find out that you can't modulate your voice or engage your audience.

Remember that your audience will have had a fine dinner, a couple of glasses of wine and they are ready to be entertained. Their expectations are high, so don't let them down.

Humour is vital, the lightness of touch is marvellous, but humour is only one of the ingredients. A speech which contains one unrelated joke followed by several more, is not really a speech at all. Inappropriate asides and near the knuckle humour are not acceptatble.

The purpose of the dinner is all important to the theme of your speech, so as always, target your content directly for the audience. Ask the question: What's in it for them?

A common problem is that some after dinner speakers prepare the speech to entertain themselves, and not their audience.

Fingers crossed, you will not be asked to speak too late in the evening and there will be time for a glass of wine after your speech. I repeat, there will be time for a glass of wine after your speech. Delivering a speech while inebriated is neither good for the audience or your personal credibility.

Try to limit your delivery between eight to ten minutes and remember to stay on theme. If it's going well and you feel that the audience are with you, then enjoy the moment, show them your appreciation by smiling a lot. If it's not going well, perhaps the humour has fallen flat, stay calm and stay on theme. Leave out the aspects which you feel most appropriate. If you have not 'struck oil' within two minutes, then 'stop boring'.

After dinner speaking is great fun. Imagine having fifty to one hundred people or more in the palm of your hand. Contributing to the enjoyment of their evening with scintillating delivery. As I said at the beginning of this article, after dinner speaking is not for the faint hearted, but for those who are up for the adrenaline rush, it's possibly the most personally rewarding aspect of any speaking assignment.