Speaking Tips from 2025 Graduation Addresses
Great commencement speeches transcend graduation to teach us all some lesson whether it’s about life or speaking to audiences big or small. And this year’s provided lots of vivid examples.
Whether you are doing the speaking or prepping someone else, there’s some tried-and-true methods that will improve both the writing and the delivering of remarks. Whether kicking off the quarterly town hall, keynoting a convention or presenting at a board meeting, good speakers do a few of these things really well. The greatest do them all.
Strong open and close.
Audience-tailored remarks.
Be authentic and confident.
Personal, illustrative stories.
Clear takeaway.
Keep it tight.
Leave the audience changed.
We reviewed numerous 2025 commencement addresses through this lens to “show, not tell” how to employ these techniques. Was there a recent speech, commencement or otherwise, where someone nailed it? Drop me a note.
Strong open and close.
Once you get beyond the opening pleasantries of all speeches, which tends to take a minute or so, it’s a gift when the speaker tells you right up front what you’re going to hear. In his address at the Northeastern University graduation, Atlantic Music Group CEO Elliot Grainge did exactly that.
“I’m going to tell you the two greatest things people have said to me,” the 31-year-old alumni said. “Impossible” and “no.” His 13-minute speech – 13!! – went on to bring to life how “hearing ‘no’ drove me to follow my gut.”
Given his own rapid rise in the music industry, he shared that, “Inexperience is a super power. Experience can make you cautious.” His remarks included insights, personal stories about his time at Northeastern and early career failures, yet remained focused on the power in becoming desensitized to rejection.
As for closers, it might be hard to top leading the whole audience in a singalong but that’s what Kermit the Frog did as this year’s University of Maryland commencement speaker. And while I thought he overdid the amphibian references (Yes, I know the school’s mascot is Testudo the Terp!) in the rest of the speech, how can you beat sending the graduates off into an unknown world with an inspiring rendition of “Rainbow Connection?”
Audience-tailored remarks.
I didn’t know singer songwriter Maggie Rogers before watching her address to the New York University Tisch School of the Arts. Man, did this 31-year-old give me chills with her inspiring words. Maggie Rogers - Commencement Speech - NYU Tisch School of the Arts 2025
An NYU Tisch alum from just nine years earlier, she spoke about coming of age in New York City, including being mooned her first night in the city by a woman trying to grub a cigarette. So many little details, wrapped in experience and transformed into wisdom.
I was particularly struck by this reference to Radio City Music Hall where the ceremony took place and where she performed years earlier. “When the spotlight hits and the house lights go down, the only thing you can see are the exit signs.” She noted there are 47 of them, reminding graduates that on the way to success many people find themselves searching for the exits.
She also didn’t miss the opportunity to call on NYU officials to support current and former students who express themselves, a reference to the president’s attacks on prominent universities. Incidentally Baron Trump attends NYU.
Authentic and confident.
It was completely on brand for famed actor and comedian Steve Carell to call a “mid-commencement address dance break during his speech at Northwestern University. While the song “That’s Not My Name” blared, he started dancing and high-fiving the dean on stage before running into the audience to do the same to graduates for a few minutes. Then he made fun of himself for being out of breath and out of shape.
It was vintage Carell, known for his down-to-earth, goofy personality that was on display through the entire address. And it also harkened back to his iconic role as Michael Scott in TV series The Office, which often found his character dancing crazily.
Steve Carell at Northwestern
In most other ways, his speech included traditional advice about the need for kindness and laughter and turning jealousy about someone else’s success into your own ambition. Both his children attended Northwestern, though he didn’t.
He ended with, "Remember the little things, like being kind and that you're not alone. Take care of one another. Remember to laugh, when you have the opportunity and to cry, when necessary." Facebook
Personal, illustrative stories.
Actress Sandra Oh’s commencement address at Dartmouth University spent the bulk of her address focused on grappling with “discomfort” and understanding “kindness.”
“Nothing has taught me more than being with this discomfort.”
While paying homage to the great commencement speakers from years before tennis champion Roger Federer last year and actress and writer Mindy Kaling, she leaned into her own discomfort in speaking to the graduates this year, relayed stories from her decade as part of the cast of long-running TV show Grey’s Anatomy and how she had to learn to live with her own discomfort.
“You can’t ghost depression or outsource a panic attack,” she told the group. She talked about finding comfort in silence and tested what she called a “bite-sized discomfort” by not speaking for nearly 40 seconds.
There did seem to be a dance theme going this year as she ended her speech by asking the audience to stand and dance to the song “Titanium.”
Clear Takeaway.
For sure, it surprises no one that award-winning actress and activist Jane Fonda, nicknamed Hanoi Jane for protesting the Vietnam War, would deliver a fiery, political speech to the University of Southern California Annenberg School of Communication.
Jane Fonda at USC Annenberg
Right from the start, the 87-year old issued a now-or-never urgency, highlighting two little-ish things for graduates and two big things that impact the future of mankind, specifically democracy and climate change. She spoke about a trend toward “individualism” that started in the 1980s that seeks to undermine community.
And she spoke directly to an audience filled with communicators in saying, “you are the people who can shape the stories by which we define ourselves, community and the world.”
While perhaps on the other end of the spectrum for Carell, Fonda’s speech was true to both who she has long been as well as focused on who this graduating class will be and the role they’ll play in politics, journalism and corporations.
She ended on the uplifting note that, “Times are very hard but not hopeless…Hope is a muscle like the heart. It’s when we take action that hope comes alive.”
Keep it tight.
I’m sure there’s a 20-minute limit on how much time a commencement speaker has to keep the ceremony moving. Most of these addresses were less than that. And that’s the point really – any speaker can deliver big ideas, deeply connect with the audience through personal stories and have a bit of fun in less than 20 minutes. So why, why, why do so many business executives and politicians feel the need to go longer, sometimes much longer?
Because they desperately need a good editor. Someone who can identify the central takeaway, ladder the rest of the remarks up to it including the stories that amplify and bring that takeaway to life. It’s a discipline to be continuously cutting to simplify until the message the audience gets is precisely what was intended and will be remembered long after the speaker has left the podium.
Leave the audience changed.
If an audience is going to give you 20 minutes (or more!) of their time, don’t you owe them a payoff? I mean, I get that some people may believe their presence is payoff enough, it really isn’t. The best speakers leave the audience changed by imparting a lesson, changing their point of view, by inspiring them to a calling.
Quirky, award-winning actress and Emerson College alum Jennifer Coolidge her speech at their college around a childhood embarrassment that she related back to her major piece of advice: “You have to be your own champion.”
Jennifer Coolidge at Emerson
The story she shared was about running an obstacle course race in grade school and thinking she’d won because she beat the fastest girl to the finish line. Turned out, she’d skipped the obstacles and was disqualified. Her classmates teased her for years.
In fact, this story framed much of her speech, highlighting the naysayers who sounded even meaner due to their Boston accents, how much it hurt her feelings and how realizing she had “insane expectations” of what was possible made all the difference in her life.
“Don’t listen to the people who mess up the real story you’ve got going,” she told the class. “When it comes to the obstacle course of your life, you have to plan it out.”
In less than 20 minutes, she delivered a truly great speech. Better than the rest.
There are undoubtedly lots of others worth mentioning. Still, to this day, I believe the very best commencement address ever written was never given directly to graduates.
It was written by Mary Schmich, a Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for the Chicago Tribune in 1997, and was entitled, “Advice, like youth, is probably wasted on the young.”
It was so good Australian film director Baz Luhrmann turned it into a song that was regularly played on the radio. Yes, that little device that used to play music before it came out of your phone, car and iPad.
Thank You to my summer assistant, Allie Pramberger, who helped with the research for this week’s newsletter.