Speaking to Inspire: Ceremonial and Motivational Speeches
University of Washington · View on Coursera ↗
Taught by Dr. Matt McGarrity
Personal DevelopmentBusiness
About the course
The most memorable speeches inspire, entertain, and praise. By blending stories and eloquence, great speeches highlight the core values motivating an audience. You might need to do this in a keynote address, a eulogy, or simply a business meeting. Inspiring audiences is a common, but difficult writing challenge. You want a speech that elevates the topic and the audience. This course gives you a method for preparing and delivering speeches that inspire and entertain. By the end of this course,
The consensus
Every one of the 20 reviews we read gave it 4★ or more. This is the most-upvoted one (5 votes).
“I liked the course. This is last in the specialization compromised of 4 courses too. And I feel this is in itself a difficult topic. I used it in parallel to complete my CC#10 - project 10 of Toastmasters competent communicator manual. CC#10 is inspirational speech. So I am using all the skills learned here to prepare the talk. Thanks.”
Coursera's 4.8 comes from 209 ratings. Of those, 1.9% are 1–2★.
Starisk reads the reviews learners voted most helpful, and weights each by the square root of its votes: a review with 80 upvotes counts about five times one with 2. Unvoted reviews are not skipped out of laziness — by this model they carry no evidence that other students endorsed them.
That measures what the most-endorsed reviews say, not “true quality.” The rating distribution above is the whole population, so you can see the sample next to it.
Reviews read on 23 Oct 2026.Read them on Coursera ↗