Before you start clinking your glasses, here's how to make a good toast

"Consider your words as a gift to the one you're toasting," suggests Valerie Sokolosky, owner of Valerie and Company, a Dallas-based corporate-protocol consulting firm. Be sincere, upbeat, flattering and, if possible, make reference to your relationship.

Be brief, warns Marilyn Moats Kennedy, managing partner of Career Strategies, a Chicago-based management consulting firm. "Think three sentences, not a speech," she recommends. Be audible and articulate. Sokolosky advises that, as a courtesy, you wait for the host (or if at a business function, the senior person) to propose the first toast. If none is forthcoming, discreetly ask the host whether you may offer a toast. As you give the toast, stand, lift your glass (an alcoholic drink is not at all necessary) and make eye contact with the "toasted."

If you've been called on in advance to offer a toast, be prepared. Enlist a sympathetic ear or practice from a 3" x 5" card in front of a mirror. Kennedy uses this confidence-boosting trick: Carry the index card in a pocket and touch it lightly when toasting. This method, she finds, helps to visualize what you planned to say. Perry E. Gresham, Ph.D., author of Toasts-- Plain, Spicy and Wry (ANNA Publishing Co.), encourages the clinking of glasses to honor the toast's history. In medieval days, the ring of a toast was believed to drive away evil spirits.