How long the talk actually is SPEECH

Writing happens in words, speaking happens in minutes

Everybody who has given a talk has written one half again too long, and almost nobody finds out until they are standing up. The reason is the unit mismatch: you write and edit in words and paragraphs, and you are given minutes, and the conversion is not something anybody does by eye.

The arithmetic is unwelcome. A page of A4 is about four minutes. So the fifteen-minute slot everybody gets is under four pages, which is always a shock the first time somebody works it out, and it explains why so many talks are a confident first half followed by a visibly compressed second.

So the first thing this does is convert at a pace you set. A hundred and thirty words a minute is a considered delivery, a hundred and sixty is brisk, and anybody who tells you they will speed up on the day is going to run over. Use the slower number if you are nervous, because nerves make people faster and then they stop making sense.

The sections are the part that makes it useful

A single total tells you that you are four minutes over and nothing about where. Section times tell you that the background you thought was two minutes is six, which is the discovery that actually fixes a talk, and it is nearly always the background.

That is also the right way to cut. Faced with a total that is too long, people trim evenly: a sentence here, a clause there. It takes ages, it damages the writing everywhere, and it recovers a minute. Section times show you which single block to remove whole, and removing one block is both faster and better, because what is left was written to be said.

Decide the cut in advance rather than on stage. Know which section goes if you are running late and how you get from the one before it to the one after: one rehearsed sentence. That is the difference between finishing on time and being stopped.

What the clock does not know

Add time for the things that are not in your text. Questions during, if this is the kind of room where people interrupt. The pause after a point you want to land. Getting to the lectern, and the laptop not finding the projector. A demonstration always takes longer live than it did at your desk.

And then read it aloud, standing up, with a timer. That is the only real test, and it routinely comes out longer than any estimate, because reading aloud is slower than reading and because you will stop to explain something you wrote clearly and now want to say differently.

Aim to finish two minutes early. Nobody has ever complained about a talk that ended early, and it gives you the margin for the one thing that always goes wrong.

Nothing you paste is uploaded, which matters when the talk is not public yet. Nearby: OUTLINE gets the structure right before the sentences exist, PLAIN finds the sentence a listener will lose, BRIEF is for a briefing rather than a talk, and Slides builds the deck.