Angela Lansbury Speeches and Making Speeches

Many speakers run over time. Their apparently endless monologue is cut short by the event organizer before the speaker has reached the end. Or the speaker, seeing a clock or hearing a bell - or worse, seeing people start to walk out, finishes suddenly.

So how do you time your speech? Often a speaker will rehearse the speech two or three times in its entirety. You can write your speech to a certain length, write the paragraph headings on card index cards, and then try to rehearse it until you remember it. 

One speaker told me he shut himself in his bedroom - then the lounge after the family left for the afternoon, and rehearsed his ten minute speech thirty times over about three hours.

A past president of my nearest speakers' club told me that it's better to chop a ten minute speech into sections and rehearse each section. So the introduction is one minute. You rehearse that ten times until you have the wording and timing right. For a five minute speech your three middle sections are one minute.  

For a ten minute speech you might have four middle sections of two minutes each. 

Similarly for a thirty minute speech you could have a five minute introduction, a five minute conclusion, and three middle sections of five minutes.

For a one hour speech you could have a five minute introduction, a five minute ending, and five sections of ten minutes each. Or a ten minute introduction, a ten minute ending, and four ten minute middle sections.

Some people speak slowly, whilst others speak faster. You could allow an extra minute or so for pauses for laughs. Or interruptions. Or audience interaction when you ask them questions.

How do you judge your pace? If you have a word counter on your computer, take a thousand word piece and see how long it takes you to read it. 

Or take a newspaper and time yourself for ten minutes, read aloud and mark where you stop. Then count the words to that point.