As father of the bride, you are expected to indulge in a little emotional outpouring as you say how much you care for your daughter, declare your confidence that she has made the right choice of husband and include a few positive thoughts about love and marriage in general.

The problem is that an unremitting, relentless stream of gushing, florid language can come across as pretentious and insincere. The simple, yet highly effective solution to this apparent dilemma is to use sincerity and emotion with caution and restraint, to spread them thinly throughout your speech, like caviar, not pile them on thickly, like marmalade.

One or two short, sharp, sensitive, deeply emotional expressions of your strong personal feelings will be far more effective and memorable than a whole series of half-hearted passing references to the pleasure and delight you are experiencing on this most happy of days.

1 Conveying Emotion And Seriousness

It’s all very well saying how much you care for your daughter, how confident you are that she has made the perfect choice of husband and how sure you are that they will have a wonderful future life together. The audience may well think ‘How nice’, but they won’t be moved.

There is an old story about a man who complained to his wife that the trouble with women is that they always take things personally. ‘Well I don’t!’ she replied, unwittingly falling into the trap he had set for her. Brides’ fathers are just as likely to dwell on their own feelings and reactions and can be stunned to discover that no one else in the room can relate to their genuine sentiments. ‘But I was almost in tears as I was saying this’ they protest. ‘How could the guests not be similarly moved?’

How indeed? The problem is that our feelings are abstract. It is not that we do not hear or understand abstractions, but without a visual peg, without something we can conjure up in our minds with colour and form, intangible ideas and concepts make little impact and are soon forgotten. Go around an art gallery and note the length of time a lively, realistic portrait will hold your attention in comparison with a piece of modern art which will hardly merit a second glance.

To illustrate this, take a look at the following two lists:

Now, put the book down for a moment and see how many of these words you can jot down from memory. You probably remembered more words from List Two. This is because all the words in that list are all tangible objects, whereas the ones in List One are abstract.

Two further factors are involved here, and neither has anything to do with the audience’s hardheartedness. Firstly, when we try to describe the physical symptoms associated with a particular emotion – be it sadness, happiness, or delight – there is little room for surprise. We all know how it feels first hand.

The paradox is that in order to hold an audience’s attention we need to provide some new or profound angle, spin or insight into these emotions. Yet how can we say something different and meaningful about what are universal feelings?

Secondly, no matter how original your description of your emotions, it does not alter the fact that those emotions belong to you, not to them.

So what is the solution? It is to be reticent about your feelings and focus instead upon an incident which illustrates them. Concentrate, not on the emotion that was evoked, but on the situation that gave rise to it. Turn abstract ideas into strong, concrete visual images.

Don’t bore your listeners with long introductions or unnecessary explanation. Get straight to the heart of the matter. Focus on a single incident or situation; provide a snapshot and it will keep the image alive in your audience’s mind and heart.

Think of your favourite books, music, films. Don’t they all share this lingering quality? Too many speakers try to tell too much, and too much of what they tell is not unique. If they drone on interminably about ballet lessons, pony riding or the Brownies, is it really surprising when listeners lose interest and mentally switch off?