Words to minutes, and minutes back to words

About 650 words at a comfortable presentation pace of 130 words a minute. Slow it to wedding-speech pace and 550 fills the same five minutes; speed it to podcast pace and you would need around 750. Write towards the lower end of that range: almost nobody in the history of public speaking has been thanked for using every second of their slot, and questions, a stumble or a laugh will eat the difference.

Roughly 7 minutes 42 seconds at 130 words a minute. The same thousand words takes about 9 minutes 5 seconds delivered slowly at a funeral or a wedding, and about 6 minutes 40 seconds in the relaxed run of a podcast conversation. Reading the same text silently would take a little over four minutes, which is the gap that catches people out when they estimate a talk from how long the draft took them to read.

About 1,300 words at 130 words a minute, before you allow for slides. Ten slides at eight seconds of settling time each add over a minute, so the script itself should come in nearer 1,150 words if the slot is hard. A twenty-minute conference talk works out at roughly 2,600 words, and the well-known eighteen-minute format lands between 2,300 and 2,900 depending on how fast the speaker naturally runs.

Because they are full of pauses that are part of the speech rather than gaps in it. A room laughing, a name that needs a moment, a glass raised, the speaker steadying themselves — none of that appears in the word count, and all of it takes time. Planning at 110 words a minute builds the pauses in. Nerves push most people faster, not slower, so the safest approach is to write for the slower pace and then deliberately take the extra time on the day.

Ordinary English conversation runs at roughly 140 to 160 words a minute, and prepared speaking is usually slower than that because the speaker is being deliberate. Analyses of well-known conference talks put their average near 160, radio and podcast delivery sits around 150, and audiobook studios ask narrators to hold 150 to 160 so that a finished hour comes to about 9,000 spoken words. Auctioneers and racing commentators exceed 250, which is precisely why they sound the way they do.

About ten double-spaced pages, counting 250 words to a page of 12-point manuscript. Broadcast scripts are usually typed much larger, so a page there is nearer 150 words and works out at roughly a minute each — which is where the old newsroom habit of counting pages instead of words comes from. On index cards written in a hand you can read at arm's length, budget around 60 words a card, so the same twenty minutes is about 44 cards.

Yes, and separately from the script. A useful rule for a conference slot is to write for 80 per cent of the time on the invitation, leaving the rest for the introduction, the settling of the room, one technical problem and the questions. The slide field above handles only the mechanical pause when a new slide appears; anything interactive — a poll, an exercise, a demonstration — has to be timed on its own and subtracted before you start writing.