Every May and June, somewhere north of 7 million college graduates sit in folding chairs, squinting into the sun, waiting for a stranger to say something worth remembering. Most of the time, the stranger obliges with pleasantries about the horizon ahead and quotes from people who died before anyone in the audience was born. The diplomas get handed out. The mortar boards fly. The speech dissolves.

And yet some of them stick. A few have changed foreign policy. Others have gone viral a decade after delivery. A handful circulate in group chats every spring like folk songs, passed hand to hand by people who weren't even there.

So what separates the ones that last from the ones that evaporate?

NPR spent years building an archive of more than 300 commencement speeches, dating to 1774. The patterns that emerged from that project, and from anyone who has studied the genre seriously, point to a handful of qualities that keep showing up in the addresses people actually remember. They are not, it turns out, especially mysterious.

Be funny — and make it count

Humor shows up in nearly every great commencement speech, but the best speakers use it as more than a warm-up act. Conan O'Brien opened his 2011 address to the Dartmouth graduating class by announcing that behind him sat a highly admired president and decorated war hero, while he, a cable television talk show host, had been chosen to impart wisdom. He called it the most damning example of what was wrong with America today. The line was a joke, but it also positioned everything that followed. A speaker who can make an audience laugh before they've settled into their seats has bought enormous goodwill for the harder things they're about to say.

The rule about humor, though, has an important corollary: it has to be aimed inward. Self-deprecation earns trust. Wit at the audience's expense creates distance. Reagan, speaking at Notre Dame in 1981, told the graduates he had assumed the honorary degree they were giving him was his first. The line worked because he was the most powerful person on the field and he was making himself the target. When O'Brien pointed out that Dartmouth was handing him the same diploma they were handing graduates who had worked for four years, the joke landed for the same reason.

Make them uncomfortable

The commencement speech has a persistent temptation: tell the people in the chairs that they are exceptional. They have worked hard. They have earned this day. Their lives will be extraordinary. The audience responds warmly. The speaker sits down feeling good.

The speeches that last tend to resist this. In 2005, David Foster Wallace stood before the Kenyon College graduating class and spent his time asking them to consider the interior life of the person standing next to them in a slow supermarket line. The speech, later published under the title This Is Water, made almost no claim about the graduates' futures. It made a different kind of claim entirely: that the way you pay attention to the world, on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon, matters more than almost anything else you accomplish.

In 2012, a high school English teacher named David McCullough Jr. told the graduates of Wellesley High School that they were not special. The statement went viral. But McCullough's actual argument was more interesting than the headline: everyone gets a trophy now, he told them, and trophies have become meaningless. His call was for genuine achievement over visible credential, for doing something because it matters rather than because it photographs well for a college application. The speech landed a book deal and a million YouTube views not because it was harsh, but because it named something that the culture had not wanted to say out loud.

Give them one thing

Most forgettable commencement speeches fail for the same reason most forgettable speeches fail: they contain too many ideas. The speakers feel the weight of the occasion and respond by loading the address with advice. Travel. Stay curious. Embrace failure. Call your parents. Take risks. Serve others. The graduates smile and remember none of it.

The speeches that cut through almost always reduce to a single, clear idea that the speaker cares about enough to develop rather than list. Steve Jobs told the Stanford graduating class of 2005 three stories. Each story was about the same thing: the impermanence of plans, and the necessity of trusting what you love even when the path disappears. The speech ran about fifteen minutes. It is the most-watched commencement address in history, with more than 40 million views on YouTube, and its message can be stated in a sentence.

Wallace's Kenyon speech makes a similar demand of its listeners. The whole address is an argument for a single claim: that genuine education is about learning to choose what you pay attention to, and how. He built twenty minutes around that claim without repeating himself, and graduates have been passing it around ever since.

Earn the wisdom

The commencement speech lives in a tradition that stretches back to colonial disputations — formal academic exercises where students defended theses before their peers. That format valued the demonstration of knowledge over the assertion of it. The best modern addresses still work this way.

George Marshall didn't tell the Harvard class of 1947 that the world was in trouble. He described, in economic and logistical terms, exactly what was happening to European food supply chains, labor markets, and political stability in the years after the war. He laid out a diagnosis before he named a cure. His speech, which proposed what became the Marshall Plan, was taken seriously in part because it had done the work to deserve seriousness.

J.K. Rowling, speaking at Harvard in 2008, built her address around a concept most graduation speakers avoid: failure. She described her own years of it, specifically and personally. Her first marriage had ended. She was a single mother, as poor as it was possible to be in Britain without being homeless. She was not peddling failure as a romantic concept. She was describing what it felt like from inside it, and what it clarified. The speech worked because the speaker had earned the right to the observation she was making.

Aim at something larger than the graduates

Somewhere around the 1970s, according to scholars who have tracked the rhetoric of these speeches, commencement addresses shifted. The moral vocabulary moved from obligation to choice. You must serve your community became you must find your calling. The address stopped pointing outward and started pointing inward.

The speeches people find themselves returning to tend to resist this framing. Michael Lewis told the Princeton class of 2012 that the privileges they had inherited came with a debt to people who hadn't been as lucky. Oprah Winfrey told the Spelman College graduates that same year that service was not a supplement to a fulfilling life — it was the mechanism. Wallace's Kenyon address makes essentially the same argument in a more interior register.

The self-help framing — your life, your passion, your authentic path — produces speeches that feel warm in the moment and leave no trace. The speeches that last make a claim about the graduates' relationship to the world beyond themselves.

The format is the opportunity

Commencement speakers have advantages that other public speakers don't. Their audience is captive, unusually open, and at a genuine inflection point. The day carries real weight — for the graduates, for the families watching, and for anyone who looks back at their own. The material is already charged. A speaker doesn't need to generate the significance. They just need to meet it.

That's what distinguishes the great ones from the forgettable ones. Not brilliance or fame or rhetorical technique, but the willingness to take the occasion seriously on its own terms rather than using it to perform sincerity. The graduates know the difference. They're sitting in folding chairs watching.

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