Wedding speech checker
Paste your speech. We tell you how long it runs when spoken, and flag the twelve things that make writing sound like a machine produced it. Free, instant, and nothing you paste ever leaves your browser.
Paste a speech to check it.
Why these particular things
This runs the same checks our own generator is held to. The em-dash, the rule of three, the “not just X, but Y” construction and the vocabulary list are the patterns that separate machine prose from how people actually speak at a wedding. There is a longer explanation of each, with the giveaway version and the fix, in the twelve tells.
The checker cannot see the thing that matters most, though: whether the speech says anything true and specific. A speech can pass every check here and still be forgettable, because it never mentions the sofa, or the ironed socks, or the year of Sunday phone calls. Specifics are what a room remembers.
Questions people ask
How long should a wedding speech be?
Most land between two and six minutes. A best man speech above about seven minutes starts to lose the room, particularly if it follows two other speeches. At a normal speaking pace of roughly 150 words a minute, 500 words is about three and a half minutes.
Does this tool send my speech anywhere?
No. The check runs entirely in your browser using pattern matching. Nothing you paste is uploaded, stored or seen by us, which matters because a wedding speech contains real names and private stories about real people.
What counts as a dead giveaway versus a habit?
A dead giveaway is something almost no British speaker produces naturally: an em-dash, the "not just X, but Y" construction, or vocabulary like tapestry, testament and whirlwind. A habit is a weaker signal that only reads as machine-written when it repeats, such as adjective pairs, signposting or three-part lists.
My speech was flagged. Does that mean it is bad?
Not necessarily. People write these phrases too, especially when nervous and reaching for something that sounds speech-like. The flags are worth reading as places the writing has gone generic, whoever wrote it. Replacing one flagged phrase with a specific true detail almost always improves it.
Or start from something that passes.
Tell us one story and we write your opening free, before you pay anything.
Start free preview