How to Use This Tool
Paste your script or type a word count. If you are writing to fit a slot, read the table at the bottom first — it gives the word budget before you start.
Speaking is slower than reading
A comfortable presenting pace is around 130 words a minute. Silent reading averages roughly 240. That gap is why a script always overruns: you wrote it at reading speed and you will deliver it at speaking speed, so it takes about 1.85 times as long as it felt.
Two thousand words is 8 minutes 20 seconds to read and 15 minutes 23 seconds to say. Working backwards, a 10-minute talk is about 1,300 words and a 20-minute one about 2,600 — roughly four and eight pages of double-spaced text.
The pace band is worth choosing deliberately:
- 110 wpm — deliberate. Right for technical content, a room where the material is new, or an audience listening in a second language.
- 130 wpm — the usual presenting pace, and a reasonable default.
- 150 wpm — conversational. Fine for familiar material with a warm audience.
- 170 wpm — fast. Some speakers sustain it well; most people reach it because they are running out of time, which the audience can hear.
Nerves speed you up
Almost everyone talks faster in front of an audience than in rehearsal, often by 10–20%. That sounds helpful for fitting a slot and it is not: the words arrive faster than they can be absorbed, the pauses that let a point land disappear, and you finish early with an audience that followed half of it.
The reliable fix is cutting material rather than trying to slow down, because pace under pressure is largely involuntary. Rehearse aloud with a timer, and if it only just fits, it does not fit.
Slides
Around one minute per slide is a workable rule for a talk with content on the slides. It is not a law — a single image held for five minutes while you tell a story is fine, and so is a rapid sequence of photographs.
What does not work is a dense deck at thirty seconds a slide. There is no time to introduce a point, support it and move on, so the delivery collapses into reading the slide aloud — which the audience can do faster than you can say it.
If the deck is too long for the slot, cutting slides is almost always better than speeding up. The material you remove is rarely missed, and the room notices pace long before it notices absence.
Everything that is not talking
Reserve time for the parts that are not in the script:
- Pauses. Silence after a key point is what makes it land, and it costs seconds each time. Ten per cent is a reasonable allowance for a normal talk.
- Demos. Budget double what the rehearsal took, because live demonstrations misbehave in front of audiences at a rate that is difficult to explain.
- Questions. Whether they come during or at the end changes the plan more than the total: interruptions consume speaking time from the middle, which is where your buffer is not.
- Setup. Getting the display working, greeting the room, being introduced.
A talk that exactly fills its slot in rehearsal will overrun in the room. Aim for about 80% and use what is left.
