Words of wit and wisdom: Commencement season arrives

Leadership comes down to five things. Or maybe three. This day is all about you, unless it's really about the family and friends who got you here. Live globally, but embrace the home and the hearth. It's commencement season, and this month, speakers sent the graduates of Maryland's colleges and universities off to the rest of their lives with these and other necessarily pithy words of wisdom, many of them blessedly brief.

- Jean Marbella, Tribune News Service

As at least two speakers noted, they were the only thing standing between the graduates and their hard-earned diplomas-and maybe an adult beverage. “We always joke commencement speakers should think of themselves as the body at an Irish wake, you have to be there, but no one expects you to do much,” said Paul Orzulak, a former speechwriter for President Bill Clinton. The co-founder of the communications firm, West Wing Writers, Orzulak has written more than 100 commencement speeches, a task he enjoys for how it allows the newly graduated in the seats to see themselves in the accomplished person at the podium. But, he said, it's also a challenge in these TED Talk-and social media-pervasive times.

“People narrate their lives so much now,” he said. “There's a sharper expectation for wit and humor.”