Arthur Brooks: How to Give a Commencement Speech That Isn’t Awful
Arthur Brooks discusses how to deliver a memorable commencement speech. He highlights that many graduation speeches tend to be forgettable or overly preachy. Brooks offers four rules to help speakers create addresses that resonate with graduates.
- ▪Arthur Brooks delivered the commencement speech at the University of Utah in 2026.
- ▪Many graduation speeches are often bland or instantly forgotten.
- ▪Brooks suggests four rules for giving a memorable commencement address.
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| Original publisher | The Free Press (Substack) |
| Canonical URL | https://www.thefp.com/p/arthur-brooks-how-to-give-a-commencement-speech-that-isnt-awful |
| Publication time | Mon, 25 May 2026 15:00:57 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-25T15:07:38.108Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-25T15:07:38.108Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | jqKmaGwsz-ZY |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Arthur Brooks: How to Give a Commencement Speech That Isn’t AwfulArthur Brooks gives the 2026 commencement speech at the University of Utah. (Harriet Richardson)Most graduation speeches are either bland, preachy, or instantly forgotten. Here are four rules for giving one graduates might actually remember.By Arthur Brooks05.25.26 — The Pursuit of Happiness with Arthur BrooksFOLLOW COLUMN --:----:--Upgrade to ListenProduced by ElevenLabs using AI narration2Graduation season is upon us. At commencements across America, graduates are sitting patiently in their caps and gowns, their parents perched uncomfortably in the bleachers of a basketball arena.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Free Press (Substack).
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