Begin well, end well, and keep the middle nice and short. That’s the secret of good speaking.
But ending is the hardest for me. I have collected a number of openings that I use on a regular basis, but constructing a really good ending is a challenge. Sometimes, because I can’t craft the ending until everything else is in place, I’m drained. Other times, I’m torn between being informal and low key or dramatic and rhetorical.
When in doubt, I go back to the ancient Greeks. They called the ending of a speech a peroration, which literally means to speak through. One meaning of speaking through is to return to the beginning and repeat the main themes, the main points, and then try to get people emotionally aroused enough to do what the speaker wants them to do.
We could also say that speaking through means that the ending of a speech should climb over commas and surmount semi-colons; that it should dramatize the consequences that lie in wait should the audience fail to act; and then, with ringing clarity, the peroration should move the audience out of their chairs, and into the realm of action.
In other words, it should inspire anger, enthusiasm, pity, resolve —because information is not enough, ideas are not enough—they only make us think. The ending of a speech should make us want to act—to vote for a candidate, to finally change what needs to be changed, to move in a new direction, or to stop what we should have stopped long ago.