Graduation Speeches Editing and Proofreading Services

The valedictorian's speech thanks the teachers, remembers the good times, and tells two hundred classmates to follow their dreams and never stop believing in themselves. Everyone claps because it would be strange not to. Nobody will remember a sentence of it by the parking lot, because nothing in it could only have been said about this particular class, in this particular hall, at the end of this particular four years.

We edit what students and speakers write for graduations and completions — valedictorian and salutatorian addresses, speeches from a class president or student representative, remarks from a guest speaker or alumnus, toasts at a graduation dinner, speeches for a smaller cohort such as a postgraduate or vocational programme, and the notes used by a parent or teacher asked to say a few words. Our editors work on speeches given to an audience that has heard this genre many times before.

The specific memory is what stops a graduation speech from being interchangeable with every other one delivered that week, and its failure is advice offered before the speaker has earned the right to give it. Follow your dreams means nothing from someone who has not yet tried and failed at one. We work through these so the speech opens with something that happened to this actual class — the year the heating failed for a month, the teacher who cried at the wrong assembly — rather than with a definition of resilience or an inspirational quotation, since a room can tell within a sentence whether it is hearing about itself; so advice is replaced with observation, given that a graduating student describing what they actually noticed about these four years carries more than instructing an audience of adults' children on how to live; so at least one uncomfortable truth about the shared experience is allowed in, because a speech that is entirely gratitude and warmth is recognised as a performance; so specific names are used carefully and kindly, as being singled out from a stage is not always experienced as an honour; so humour is drawn from a real shared reference rather than a generic joke about assignments and coffee; so the ending returns to the room rather than reaching for the wider world and the rest of your lives; and so it is timed to what the room can actually sit through, which is usually less than the speaker believes. Speeches written this way are the ones people quote at reunions a decade later.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including drafts and anything about your class or cohort you would rather handle carefully. We are editors rather than speechwriters composing your experience for you, and we offer no view on your school, your class or what should be said. What we can do is help you find what only this class would recognise.