760 Words for Four Minutes: Rebuilding a Speech for the Ear
You have four minutes for a persuasive speech to an assembly of 180 Year 12 students, followed by two minutes of questions from a panel of three. Your topic is lowering the voting age to 16. Your draft is 760 words. Timed aloud, it ran 6 minutes 10 seconds. You speak at roughly 150 words per minute, dropping to about 130 when you slow down for your key point. The draft contains a 40-second personal anecdote about your grandmother, nine statistics, three rhetorical questions in a row, and a slide showing a table of voter turnout by age. The panel includes the Head of Social Sciences, who has told you she will ask about turnout at the 2020 referenda.
1. Set a realistic word target for four minutes and identify exactly what you cut to reach it, with reasons.
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Four minutes at your normal 150 words per minute is 600 words, but you slow to about 130 for your key point and you will lose five to eight seconds to laughter, a pause, a slide change. Plan for 3 minutes 40 seconds of speech: about 560 words. You need to cut roughly 200.
Nine statistics is a data dump - audiences retain two or three. Keep the three best sourced and most surprising, and name the source once. Turn the turnout table into one spoken number; a table on a slide during a speech is unreadable and splits attention. Cut two of the three rhetorical questions. Trim the grandmother anecdote from 40 seconds to about 25: enough to establish the person, then get out.
Keep the referenda turnout figure out of the speech and in your notes for the panel. The Head of Social Sciences has told you her question; answering it in the two minutes shows you can handle evidence under pressure, and it stops the speech from becoming a list.
2. Identify two features of the draft that work on the page but fail aloud, and rewrite one sentence to show the difference.
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On the page a reader can re-read; an audience cannot.
- Long noun phrases carrying the argument, for example 'the lowering of the voting age to sixteen years of age would result in increased civic participation among young people'. The listener holds five ideas before the verb arrives. Rewrite for one idea per breath: 'Lower the voting age to sixteen and sixteen-year-olds start voting. People who vote at sixteen tend to keep voting.'
- Discourse markers written for the eye - 'furthermore', 'in addition', 'as previously stated'. On the page they signal structure; aloud they signal an essay being read out. Replace them with oral signposting: a pause, a direct question to the room, a repeated phrase.
Also cut the table slide. The test for any sentence is whether you can say it in one breath and whether a listener knows what to do with it before the next one starts.
3. Judge the three rhetorical questions in a row. Is this deliberate use of an oral language feature, and what would you do instead?
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Three in a row is a technique worn as a badge. A rhetorical question works because the audience answers it silently, which takes a beat; the second arriving immediately means nobody answered the first, so the effect collapses into a list of questions and starts to sound like written text read aloud. It also reads as pressure rather than argument, and an audience notices when it is being pushed.
Keep one, place it where you genuinely want a pause, and answer it yourself so it carries content: 'Should sixteen-year-olds vote? They already pay tax, they can work, and 41 per cent of them told the Electoral Commission they would.' The pause is real and you have used it to deliver evidence.
If you want a second, make it structurally different - a question you return to at the end, so it frames the speech instead of stacking. Deliberate use means choosing the technique for what it does to this audience at this moment, not including it because it appears on a list of oral features.