That’s the situation we find ourselves in at the leaving presentation, of course. This is something that comes to us all in the end.

But if you follow a few simple pointers, it needn’t fill you with terror.

First, keep it brief. Nobody expects you to talk for twenty minutes: three to five minutes would be more like the right length.

Second, keep it informal. Although there might be a little sadness, especially if you’ve been with the company for many years and have lots of friends, the occasion is basically about wishing you well and celebrating your achievements. You’ll probably have just listened to a brief address by your boss in which he or she paid tribute to your good qualities – but also mentioned an amusing memory or two. You could do the same about your colleagues, as long as your story is funny and inclusive.

Third, talk about some memory, something that brings a smile to everyone’s face.

Fourth, say how much you’ve enjoyed being part of the team, working on shared projects, experiencing the camaraderie.

Fifth, say a little about your future plans, what you’ll be doing.

Sixth, thank everyone for the present and tell them how much you’ll miss them.

Those are all good things to do. Now here are a few things you definitely shouldn’t do.

Don’t waffle, ramble or drift off the point into some interminable and boring story that no one wants to hear. The key word is punchy (not punch-drunk).

Don’t criticise the company or anyone there; even if your boss makes Attila the Hun look compassionate and caring, now is not the time to mention it. In fact, there is probably never a time for that, because you might need a reference from that very place. You might even want to use the services of your old company in your new role elsewhere. Not burning your boats is always good advice (even on dry land).

Don’t brag. Even if you’ve landed a dream job, earning in a month what you used to work a year for, keep it to yourself. There’s something to be said for downplaying your prospects rather than beefing them up.

If you stick to these suggestions, your leaving speech should be enjoyable for all concerned. And one last word of advice: rehearse it before you actually give it. Practice may not make perfect, but it does eliminate horrible bloopers.

By David Vickery

Here is an example of a Persuasive Speech Topic sent in by Matteo Berto.

Ladies, gentlemen, there has recently been a debate as to whether social networking sites do more harm than good.

Personally, I believe social networking sites are harmful and do have consequences. I have solid evidence to support my statement and so I would like to start with a true story concerning Facebook – a popular social networking site.

Not too long ago, a girl in her teens made a friend on Facebook – a chat buddy. This other unidentified friend didn’t give any personal details and one day this girl and friend met up at the mall.  The girl was never seen again. This is a serious matter because let’s say this happened to all girls – it would be chaos. Another story is that of a suicide because a person couldn’t meet up with another person on another social networking site. People – is our nation known for its numerous social networks which invade privacy and prevent outdoor activity and exercise? Are our students to spend time chatting online instead of studying for future careers which make this country great?

The opposition argues that social networking sites give people their own space and that these blog sites represent fun and socialisation. Well, would we not prefer our children to go outside and socialise and meet friends that they know where they live and they know their gender? Did people in the 60s need social networking sites? In the olden days we didn’t express a need for an online high tech chatting system. Social networking sites prevent youths from spending time with their parents and their siblings. Another issue about social networking sites is what if your child comes across discrimination or cyber bullying? This only adds to depression. If we are to be a happy nation we should restrict these sites to people above the age of sixteen. This is a fairly easy alternative which I am sure the majority of you would vote for.

Overall, the benefits are few and the drawbacks are many – social networking sites are the centre of misconduct, less studying and unsafe blogs. Do we want our youths to have their eyes glued to computer screens or their ears plugged to headphones? We must restrict social networking sites to 16s or above! Get your children outside socialising and inside studying!

By Matteo Berto, aged 12.

Do you have any examples of speeches that you have given. Please send them in and we will publish them.

The speech was given at Stanford in 2005 and is very moving. In particular you will note the use of the Rule of Three in the way that he tells three stories.

Here is a transcript of the speech.

Thank you. I’m honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. Truth be told, I never graduated from college and this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation.

Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories. The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months but then stayed around as a drop-in for another eighteen months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out? It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife, except that when I popped out, they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking, “We’ve got an unexpected baby boy. Do you want him?” They said, “Of course.” My biological mother found out later that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would go to college.

This was the start in my life. And seventeen years later, I did go to college, but I naïvely chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and no idea of how college was going to help me figure it out, and here I was, spending all the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back, it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out, I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms. I returned Coke bottles for the five-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example.

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer was beautifully hand-calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me, and we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts, and since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them.

If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on that calligraphy class and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.

Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college, but it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later. Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards, so you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something–your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever–because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.

My second story is about love and loss. I was lucky. I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents’ garage when I was twenty. We worked hard and in ten years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. We’d just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and I’d just turned thirty, and then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew, we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so, things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge, and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our board of directors sided with him, and so at thirty, I was out, and very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down, that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure and I even thought about running away from the Valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me. I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I’d been rejected but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods in my life. During the next five years I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world’s first computer-animated feature film, “Toy Story,” and is now the most successful animation studio in the world.

In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT and I returned to Apple and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance, and Lorene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful-tasting medicine but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life’s going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love, and that is as true for work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking, and don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it, and like any great relationship it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death. When I was 17 I read a quote that went something like “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “no” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important thing I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life, because almost everything–all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure–these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago, I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctors’ code for “prepare to die.” It means to try and tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next ten years to tell them, in just a few months. It means to make sure that everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope, the doctor started crying, because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and, thankfully, I am fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept. No one wants to die, even people who want to go to Heaven don’t want to die to get there, and yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It’s life’s change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it’s quite true. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalogue, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stuart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late Sixties, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. it was sort of like Google in paperback form thirty-five years before Google came along. I was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Stuart and his team put out several issues of the The Whole Earth Catalogue, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-Seventies and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath were the words, “Stay hungry, stay foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. “Stay hungry, stay foolish.” And I have always wished that for myself, and now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you. Stay hungry, stay foolish.

Thank you all, very much.

On the night he was made the new president of the United States, Barack Obama delivered a speech that might have seemed like it came off the cuff, but trust me, this was a well-planned and well-rehearsed speech that tackled and succeeded in many of the key concepts and made what will be classed as one of the greatest speeches since Martin Luther King Jr's "I have a dream" speech.

You can read the speech in full here.

The power of three is a technique that has been used in all of the greatest speeches. It is used because it flows nicely, because it is enough for the listener to absorb without feeling overloaded and because it feels complete (I am even using it myself). Obama uses the power of three technique several times in his speech, see the following example -

“It’s been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this
day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America,”
he said to a long roar.

It’s been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did

1. on this day,
2. in this election,
3. at this defining moment,

see how Obama has used three points to illustrate what he could have said in one point, or indeed not at all -

It's been a long time coming, but tonight, change is coming to America.

The sentence says the same as Obama's original sentence, but it doesn't sound enough, it doesn't give a feeling of inclusion and it doesn't have that poetic feeling of impact that Obama gives his own words.

Obama has not only used the power of three here, but he has also involved his audience with the use of the phrase "what WE did". This involves them in his celebration, makes them feel part of his success, and will make the people of America, his audience, feel successful too. Using the word "we" gives the feeling that Obama and those that voted for him are united, that they have succeeded in a mission and succeeded together, very similar to Martin Luther King Jnr's speech which you can read here.

Take a look at this second example -

If there is anyone out there

1. who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible;
2. who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time;
3. who still questions the power of our democracy,

tonight is your answer. ”

Not only does it use the power of three again, but it also has repetition, another useful tool for getting the point across, and emphasising an important aspect.

On the subject of useful tools, and the involvement of the people, take a look at this part -

It’s the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat
and Republican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay,
straight, disabled and not disabled – Americans who sent a message
to the world that we have never been just a collection of individuals or a collection of Red States and Blue States: we are, and always will be, the United States of America.

Obama probably hasn't left anyone out of that list, and it works on two levels. Firstly, whichever group you fit into will stand out to you when he says it, so it gives the feeling that he is speaking directly to you, he has recognised who you are and is personally addressing you. Secondly, by grouping everyone together he has once again created a feeling of togetherness.

Further into his speech, Obama gives reference to events that have happened in the past, the abolition of black slavery, Pearl Harbour, times before women had rights- each and every one of these references will have touched a nerve with the people of America, and will give a connection between the people and their new president, very much like Martin Luther King's technique.

To be a great speaker you have to be able to do three things (yes, there's that number again) -

1. you have to connect with your audience
2. you have to make them feel as if you are addressing them individually
3. you have to make them believe

Obama has achieved this and has achieved this public speaking thing on a level that can only be described as perfection, and I am definitely looking forward to the inauguration speech.

Sharren L Bessant

Secondly, never get too aggressive in your speech. Emotion and passion are the key to writing the best material that you can; but consider a boxer or any other martial artist -  the moment they lose concentration and begin to show signs of anger and loss of control, they are punished for it. So keep your facts effective and to the point.
Right, now let's begin to write your speech. For the purpose of this advisory article, I am going to use saving the rainforests as my argument.

Whenever I have to give a persuasive speech, I always start with an introduction, similar to the one below:

"During August 2006 to July 2007, the Brazilian government carried out a survey on the decrease of the Brazilian rainforests. In this time, more than 2.7 million acres disappeared – equalling about four football fields of rainforest per minute. Not only did this harm local villagers and their livelihoods, and the hundreds of millions of animals and insects that lived there, but it also directly affected everyone you and I know by filling the atmosphere with billions of tonnes of CO2."

In that short paragraph, I have grabbed the audience's or reader's attention, made it personal to them and given factual evidence to support my case. You will find that this is a very effective opening to your speech.

After the opening paragraph, you should aim to follow it up with two to three more paragraphs, using factual evidence supporting your case. You should also make it personal to the audience, not individually, but as a whole. Tell them that if they don't do something to stop this decrease of natural resources, that not them, not their children, but somewhere down the line, someone  will have to pay the price of our generation poisoning our own environment.

After you have made your points, you must give an understanding reason why the rainforests are being demolished. Something like the paragraph below is what you should be aiming to say:

"The rainforests of the world are being cut down and demolished for us. For the newspapers that you read, for the paper our children draw pictures on, and even the toilet roll we use. We cannot change what has happened, but we can change the future-"

After the above paragraph you have to give a solution. This does not have to be a solution that involves donating money, or going miles out of their way to help. They can be little changes, that can quite literally change the world. For example, carrying on from the above paragraph:

"-We can help to plant trees and plants in our own gardens, or send seeds to a charity who will do this for us. We can recycle the paper that we use, so fewer trees have to be demolished to satisfy our needs, and we can watch our carbon footprint, and do what we can to decrease it. These changes won't change your life, but they will change the world we live in for the better."
The above paragraph is an ideal way to end your speech.

If you use the above help and advice you can add your own passion and desire to it, use real facts that are easily found on the web or in books.

If you follow the above points, you cannot go wrong.

Good luck with your speeches.

By Ryan Marshall

The new term is about to start and we will soon see a new batch of students visiting our Persuasive Speech Topic pages.

Here are a few more ideas on how you can make the title more compelling

• All I want for Christmas is … ____ (e.g. to bring the troops back home)
• Happiness is … ___________ (e.g. a pet fish)
• My vision for a perfect … ___________ (e.g. a pet fish)

Lists

Lists also make for compelling persuasive speech titles. Here are a few examples.

• Ten ways to make yourself carbon neutral
• Change your life in 5 easy steps
• 7 steps to a healthier heart
• 12 ways to make you a better driver
• 100 things to do before you die

Compare and contrast

The compare and contrast can also make for a good title.

Here are some examples:

• Are kitchen gadgets really useful, or do they just clutter up your drawers?
• Stalin – hero or despot?
• Who got to the top of Everest first – Hillary or Tenzing?
• Milk or soya. Which one is best for you?
• Should I stay or should I go? The case for leaving home

You can also use the “Why we should” beginning to your titles:

• Why we should close hospitals if they get infected with MRSA
• Why we should save more
• Why we should take up rowing
• Why we should give green gifts

Here are a range of other ideas for persuasive speech topics:

• Gambling
• Composting your left-overs
• Keep fit
• Why we should bring the troops back home
• Nuclear disarmament
• The need for better school dinners
• Drink driving
• Better treatment of sewage
• How can we remove drugs from sport?
• How to write a good CV
• Self sufficiency
• Babies who are forced to smoke – why pregnant mothers should not smoke
• Talking to plants
• Why antibiotics will not work in the future
• How to handle fireworks with care
• Why we should cut out meat from our diets
• Zero tolerance to anti-social behaviour
• Making all publishing companies use recycled paper for all books
• Should we allow smacking of children?

You could also add in to the title “I will convince you…” at the start.

Here are some weird and wacky informative speech topics that we have extracted from a range of posts on our Forum

The future of the pork sausage market
The importance of users logging all problems with the IT Helpdesk
Eutrophication
Infrared Hardware
Ocean/lake dredging
A type of food or drink like Coke
The life of a potato

Cause & Effect
Ancient Egyptian mummification
Auckland – ‘the city of sails’
Adventure sports
Propaganda
Cults
Is advertising brainwashing us?
Gastric Bypass
Plastic Surgery
Capital Punishment
How to implement and maintain new policies in the workplace
The Godfather by Mario Puzo
“in 10 years time I will be…?”
Presenting technical information to managers
Analyse two characters from a biological, nursing or psychological view
Teaching origami
How to bake a cake
Why wearing a suit makes you more successful
Joan of Arc
Maintaining high standards by developing a team culture that challenges poor performance
Urban Issues
Youth Issues
Environmental Issues
Music
Gender Issues
Things around us
Outer space
Newspaper sales
Why I think I am suitable to be a sales representative with a particular company
A comparison of the movies FIGHT CLUB and A BEAUTIFUL MIND
A famous person, e.g. Mary Pickford, the actress
Preparing for the New World – the future of business
Mysteries in history
The Lindbergh kidnapping case

What makes one person's speech stand out and be remembered as one of the greatest? So great that people study it long after it was delivered, even after the cause has been forgotten?

On the other hand, what makes another person's speech last only as long as the time it takes to deliver it, forgotten as soon as the audience leaves the room? Is there a single aspect of speech-making that really is absolutely essential to its success?

Doris Lessing's "Nobel Prize for Literature" acceptance speech, which can be read in full here, is up there with the greatest. Perhaps not directly alongside Martin Luther King Jr but it is quite close on the speech perfection scale. The question is why, and the answer is pure passionate emotion. When you look at it this way, the theory is simple, but putting it into practice is not quite as easy.

Almost anyone can stand in front of a crowd of people and talk about their chosen topic, not everyone can make it believable. Freelance writer, Dan Blacharski says that Lessing's speech was "both eloquent and thoughtful", a very apt comment, but he does not pinpoint the reason behind this. In short, Lessing's speech was everything she believes in, poured out in a waterfall of passionate emotion, the "eloquence and thoughtfulness" were just secondary factors.

Garr Reynolds, has produced a presentation top ten, and believes that passion is the single most important component. The first point in the list says " let your passion for your topic come out for all to see." This does not only apply to those worldly greats ,though; this theory is the same for anyone faced with a presentation, on any level.

When Martin Luther King Jr delivered his famous "I have a dream" speech, and when Lessing more recently delivered her acceptance speech they both spoke from deep inside themselves. About issues and concerns that meant more to them at that point than anything else ever did. Stevie Edwards has written a good analysis of the Martin Luther King speech.

The key point is impact and power and that doesn't come from talking about something that is of no interest to you as the speaker. You cannot "sell" something to someone else if it is a subject that you do not understand, care about or at least have an interest in. Take note, students. Next time you are asked to prepare a presentation, choose a topic that you believe in, make it something that you feel strongly about and when the time comes to present – don't just say it, deliver it with feeling, with deep emotion and heartfelt passion. Don't just let your audience hear it, make them feel it too, only then will it become memorable.

Posted by staff writer Sharren L Bessant

Here is a simple technique to improve your presentation, speech or essay. It is the compare and contrast.

It is one of those old oratory techniques that has been used since the times of Cicero (and probably before).

A contrast (or juxtaposition) is where two viewpoints are placed close to each other for effect.

Instead of giving out a list of facts, you compare them from different angles.

Here is a memorable example. John F Kennedy wanted to encourage American citizens to become more active in helping the country.

He could have said “We all need your help” and it would have been forgotten two days later. Instead he used a contrast and said -

“Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”

Here is another example. In Hamlet, Shakespeare could have written “I think that I might kill myself”

Instead he wrote “To be or not to be, that is the question.” He then goes on to compare “Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them?”. You can read the to be or not to be speech on this link.

There are many other examples of contrasts in literature. One of the most famous is the start of “A Tale of Two Cities” by Charles Dickens.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,
it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness,
it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity,
it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness,
it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair,
we had everything before us, we had nothing before us,
we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way…”

To start using it in a presentation or speech, you just need to start bringing some contrast statements into your script.

“On one hand we have the … , on the other hand we are …”

“The situation put us between a rock and a hard place.”

To structure a speech or essay – you can use the compare and contrast structure.

So if your talk was on China,

You could say “China has a population of 1,321 million.”

A stronger statement would be “China has a population of 1,321 million, which is over four times as much of that of the 300 million in the USA.”

Other examples of contrasts include

“An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”

“It’s not what you do, it’s the way that you do it.”

“Content makes poor men rich; discontent makes rich men poor.” Benjamin Franklin.

“There is nothing to fear but fear itself.“ Franklin D. Roosevelt

Do you have any other good examples of contrasts? Just add them into the comments box below.

Ladies and gentlemen, firstly I would like to say a massive thank-you to all of you for joining me at this great retirement party.

When I joined the company- (Say when you joined the company, how you felt about joining the company and what you aimed to achieve when you started. Say how the years have been for you at the company, what you have and haven't liked, and what it has been like to see so many things come and go around you, for example staff, and changes to daily tasks.)

My time at the company has been amongst the best years of my working life. As well as the skills and qualifications that I have gained along the way, I have gained something way more important. I found and developed great friendships, some that will stay with me for many, many years to come. I have also gained a feeling of belonging, and enjoyment in the job that I did. These were the real reasons that I enjoyed coming to work every day.

So finally, after ??? years at the company, I am going to shut up. But just before I do there are just a few thank-yous that I would like to make. Firstly to the people who have helped make me who I am ( All your MDs and senior bosses, etc.), to all my friends, who have become my second family over the years. And finally, a general thank-you to everybody for making my time here so enjoyable. Thank you.