Speech Contest: A 150-Word Summary Is Not a Three-Minute Speech
Read the notice and the conversation.
SPEECH CONTEST (English Department)
- Submit a 150-word summary of your speech topic to Room 203 by May 8.
- Preliminary round: May 15, three minutes maximum, in classrooms.
- Final: May 22, in the gym; parents may attend.
- In the final you may not read from a paper. The preliminary allows one small card.
- Last year's winner spoke at about 120 words per minute and used the full three minutes.
Ken: I'll write my 150 words, memorize them, and that's my speech done.
Mina: Wait. The 150 words is the summary you hand in, not the speech itself.
Ken: But three minutes is only about 360 words at competition speed, right?
Mina: Right - and Ms. Sato said the winner last year still had time for a greeting and a closing line. Also, you can't use a card in the final, so your opening has to come out automatically.
1. Explain exactly what Ken is confusing, and calculate how much of the three minutes a memorized 150-word text would fill.
Read the worked answer
The confusion: Ken treats the written submission as the spoken text. The notice asks for a 150-word summary of the topic - a description of what the speech will be about, sent to Room 203 by May 8. The speech itself is a separate performance, limited to three minutes on May 15.
The arithmetic: at 120 words per minute, 150 words takes 150 ÷ 120 = 1.25 minutes, i.e. one minute and fifteen seconds. That leaves one minute forty-five seconds of the three minutes unused - more than half.
What this means: to fill three minutes at 120 wpm Ken needs roughly 360 words of spoken text, and Mina notes the winner still fitted in a greeting and a closing at that length. So a memorized 150-word text would be short by about 210 words. Ken's plan fails not because 150 words is wrong, but because two different documents - summary and speech - have been merged into one.
2. In this notice, what does "preliminary round" tell you about the two rounds? Use the word itself and one other line of the notice as evidence.
Read the worked answer
"Preliminary" means coming before the main event, as a qualifying stage. So the May 15 round is not a rehearsal or a second chance; it is the stage that decides who reaches May 22. Some entrants will not continue.
Evidence from the notice:
- The two rounds have different rules - one small card is allowed on May 15, no paper at all on May 22. Different rules for the same performance would be unnecessary unless the second round involved a smaller, selected group.
- The final is in the gym with parents invited, while the preliminary is in classrooms. A change of venue and audience signals a step up, not a repeat.
- The submission deadline (May 8) precedes both, so it functions as an entry requirement, not part of either performance.
A student who reads "preliminary" as "practice round" would prepare a speech that is never delivered to parents and would carry a card into a round where cards are banned.
3. A classmate says: "Mina says the opening must be automatic. That just means memorize it." Is that an adequate reading of her point? Explain.
Read the worked answer
It is partly right but too narrow. Mina's point is that in the final there is no paper, so the moments where a speaker normally glances down - the greeting, the move from introduction to body, the closing - must be carried in memory. Memorizing the words is one way to do that.
But "automatic" also implies something memorizing alone does not give:
- A memorized opening that is recalled still costs attention. An automatic one runs while the speaker thinks about the first content point. Mina is describing fluency, not storage.
- The notice bans paper, not thinking. If Ken freezes mid-sentence, memory has failed even though the words were memorized.
- Ms. Sato's detail about the winner's greeting and closing shows the issue is time management at the edges of the speech, which memorizing a block of text does not solve.
A better answer: the opening must be rehearsed until it needs no attention, which usually means saying it aloud many times, not simply being able to write it from memory.