How many words is a 10-minute speech?

How many words is a 10-minute speech?

1,100 words at 110 words per minute, 1,300 at 130 and 1,500 at 150. Plan at 1,300. The extra 200 words in the fast column are not free: at 150 wpm you have no time to pause, and a ten-minute talk with no pauses is the longest ten minutes an audience can spend.

The speech length calculator uses the same minutes × wpm arithmetic for any figure in this table. For the pace itself, the words per minute speaking test measures your reading speed in about a minute, and how fast you should speak explains why a room changes the target.

What fits in ten minutes?

A question, two stories, and an answer. Ten minutes is the first length where the listener expects an argument rather than a single anecdote: one story is evidence, and evidence needs something to be evidence for. That is the shape of a conference talk, a keynote slot at a small event, or the ten-minute version of a work presentation.

The mistake is scaling up a five-minute talk by adding detail. Detail is what makes a long talk feel long. What fills ten minutes is a second example that tests the first one — two stories that agree, or two that disagree — with a sentence between them that says what the pair means.

Worked example: a 514-word story at three paces

Here is a true story from our catalogue, 133 Days on a Raft. The advanced text is 514 words. Time it at three steady paces:

This is the important arithmetic on the page. At 130 words per minute, a 10-minute slot is 1,300 words, and the story is 514 of them: 1,300 − 514 = 786 words still to write. The story is under two-fifths of the talk. If you have been trying to stretch one story to ten minutes, that is why it feels thin — there are six minutes of talk that the story cannot supply.

Here is a budget that does fill the slot, using a second true story from the catalogue, the mother who broke into the Olympics at 451 words:

The two stories are 965 words, which is 7

. The remaining 335 words are the part most speakers leave until the night before: 100 words to set up the question, 100 to say what the first story shows, and 135 to close. Those 335 words are also the part an audience remembers, because they are the only place the talk says what it thinks.

At 110 words per minute the same two stories take 8

and leave only 1 — 135 words — for the entire frame. At 150 the stories take 6 and leave 3, or 535 words. Same talk, three different scripts. That is why the pace test comes before the word count.

What do you cut or add to fit ten minutes?

• At 110 wpm, two full stories leave no room to say anything about them. Either drop to one story and make the talk a five-minute talk, or cut each story by about 80 words and give the frame 300.
• At 130 wpm, the budget above works as written. Add nothing; the 335-word frame is the work.
• At 150 wpm, you have 535 words of frame, which is enough for a third beat — the counter-example, the objection, the thing that could have gone differently. Use it for the argument, not for more story.

What to cut, in order: the catalogue of Kallipateira's champion relatives, the ship's tonnage and route, and any date that is not load-bearing. What to keep: the raft, the fish hook made from a flashlight spring, the shark, the 133 days; and the mother who jumped the barrier while her son won. Those images are why either story survives being retold.

A ten-minute outline

At 130 words per minute, with the two stories in place:

The words sum to 1,300 and the times assume a steady 130 wpm, so the pauses come out of the leftover seconds. If your run-through lands at 9

, do not add a third story; slow the two transitions and let the last line sit.

Try it: Retell the first thirty seconds of the Poon Lim story aloud — the torpedo, the sinking, the empty water. Record it, then time it. If thirty seconds of story takes you 40, your ten-minute script is really a seven-and-a-half-minute script and the clock will find out in front of an audience.

How do you practise a ten-minute speech?

In sections of ninety seconds or less. A ten-minute run-through tells you almost nothing — the errors blur into the flow — while a ninety-second take of one beat tells you exactly what to fix. Rehearse the two stories separately, then rehearse the 335-word frame as its own short talk, because the frame is the part you have not said aloud before.

The twelve-minute solo loop is in how to practise a speech alone. When the sections are solid, run the whole thing twice with a timer and compare the finish time to 10

; if it is under 9, restore a cut detail rather than adding a new one. The five-minute page has the shorter version of the same budget, and the calculator will convert any section you write.