Every spring, thousands of graduates file into arenas and auditoriums across the country, looking for wisdom, inspiration, and perhaps a little reassurance as they prepare to trade lectures and exams for careers, responsibilities, and an uncertain future. Most speeches serve their moment. A rare few transcend it.
As one of the country’s foremost speechwriters and the creator of Harvard Kennedy School’s graduate-level speechwriting course, SKDK Managing Director and Co-Head of Executive Communications Stephen Krupin recently joined WHYY to share what it takes to make a commencement address memorable.
Here’s what he had to say.
The best speech is the one only you can give
The most common mistake commencement speakers make is reaching for universality when they should be reaching for specificity. Krupin’s guiding principle is straightforward: the best speeches are the ones that can be delivered only by you, to only this audience, at this moment.
That means doing real work before a single word is written. What is the advice only this speaker can give, and how was it hard-earned? What is the mood in the room? Is there anxiety about the job market, about the state of the world, about what comes next? The speech has to meet graduates where they are, not where the speaker wishes they were.
“Let’s make sure that we center the students,” Krupin said. “Let’s make sure that we’re matching the mood of that room or of the world.”
Get the clichés out of your system first
Commencement speeches have a cliché problem, and Krupin is the first to admit it. The “go save the world because we messed it up” speech. The speaker who opens by saying they don’t remember who spoke at their own graduation. The kind of advice that sounds meaningful when you hear it, but is hard to remember a week later.”
Krupin’s approach is to build time at the start of the process to call out tropes and set them aside. Once that is done, the real work can begin: finding the stories, the specific details, and the earned wisdom that make a speech feel like it was written exclusively for this room.
Write for the room, not for posterity
The speakers who try hardest to be memorable often aren’t. The speeches that people remember are usually the ones that weren’t trying too hard.
“If you write for the room, maybe it will last forever,” Krupin said. “But that’s not necessarily the goal. The goal is to give good advice, encouragement, recognition to the people who are sitting right in front of you at this important moment in their lives.”
The graduates did not show up to watch someone cement their legacy. They showed up because this is a significant transition in their lives, and they are hoping someone says something worth carrying with them.
The goal is to turn listeners into actors
Krupin referenced a framework from Harvard President Emerita Drew Gilpin Faust, who joined him for the conversation: the best speeches make audiences who walk in as listeners walk out as actors.
That shift is the real measure of a commencement address. Not whether it trends or gets quoted years later, but whether the people in those seats leave feeling differently about what they are capable of. That starts with the why and the what before any attention is paid to the how:
- Why is this speaker giving this speech?
- What do they want these graduates to think, feel, or do when they walk out?
Only after those questions are answered does the packaging — the structure, the sound bites, the memorable triplets — have anything real to hold.
The speech still matters
In an era of short-form content and infinite distraction, it might seem like the commencement address is a relic. Faust pushed back on that directly. There is something about physical presence, the crowd, the tone of voice, the energy of a room full of people experiencing the same moment together, that no other format can replicate.
A great commencement speech is not just a delivery mechanism for advice; it is a gift. Like any gift worth giving, it requires knowing exactly who you are giving it to.
Catch the full conversation 🔽