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Commencement Mashup: The Speech In 8 Easy Steps

By John Poole
Published May 21, 2014 at 6:03 AM CDT

A noble institution? A good show? A tedious quarter-hour of lame jokes told under the hot sun? The American commencement address can be all of these things.

We skipped and slogged through 50 of the most popular commencement speeches on YouTube - looking for inspiration, wisdom, amusement, corny jokes and clichés - to bring you this mashup of highlights and lowlights.

If this mashup inspires you to see and read more of some of these speeches, NPR's new commencement speech database holds over 300 outstanding speeches going back to 1774.

Maybe one of them can help prepare you for the "real" world.

Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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John Poole
John Poole is a senior visuals editor at NPR. He loves working with talented people and teams to create compelling stories that resonate with the 40 million people who visit NPR's digital platforms each month.
See stories by John Poole
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