Graduation season is upon us again, and with it comes the vacant, cliché-ridden literary animal that is the graduation speech. Over at Lit Hub, Emily Harnett revisits David Foster Wallace’s famous Kenyon graduation speech, “This Is Water,” and marvels at the insidiousness of the speech’s logic and message:
Tell your audiences that they’re too smart to want a certain thing and give it to them anyway. Remind everyone that they’re too hip for corny dad sermonizing and then double down in the corny dad sermonizing. This is a great way to write a commencement speech—not by avoiding platitudes, but by drawing an enchanted circle around yourself where the things we thought were platitudes can be revealed as divine truths.
