Three minutes, 480 words, one heliaki she cannot explain
Tupou, Year 12, is one of six finalists in the school Lea Faka-Tonga speech competition. She has three minutes; a bell rings at 3:15 and speakers are stopped. The audience of about 120 includes the principal, a faifekau from the local church, and the ʻofisa ʻo e kolo from her grandmother's village. Her draft is 480 words, opens 'Mālō e lelei ki he kotoa', and is salted with 'actually', 'like' and 'you know'. In the middle she wants to use an image of a bird flying out to sea as a heliaki for young people leaving the village. She found it online, likes it, but cannot say what it conventionally signals. She plans one palm card of headings, a 15-second pause after the opening, and delivery at roughly 150 words a minute. Her rehearsal recording runs 3 minutes 40 seconds, and the last 40 seconds were rushed.
1. Work out what has to be cut and what cannot be cut, and give a target word count with the arithmetic shown.
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The arithmetic. 480 words at a planned 150 wpm is 3:12 of text before any pause. Add the 15-second pause and she is at 3:27 - already past the bell, which is why the rehearsal ran 3:40: she is actually delivering nearer 131 wpm once pauses and nerves are counted. Available speech is about 2:45, so at 131 wpm the target is roughly 360–380 words. That means cutting about 100–120 words, not trimming punctuation.
Cannot go. The opening acknowledgement of the elders. It costs ~20 seconds and it is the first thing the faifekau and the ʻofisa ʻo e kolo hear; a speech that opens with a classmates' greeting misreads the room before it has said anything. Keep one clear claim and the closing.
Goes. The second anecdote, which repeats the first point; the list of individual thank-yous; the English filler; and the statistic she cannot source. Cheapest cut first: repetition, then filler, then detail.
2. Which of her English words must be replaced, which can stay, and what principle decides?
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The principle is audience and function, not purism.
Replace or cut: 'like' and 'you know'. These carry no meaning; they signal peer-to-peer talk and they mark the speech as aimed at the back row rather than at the visitors. 'Actually' is doing the same work and can simply be deleted.
Can stay: school-system words with no settled everyday equivalent - NCEA, internal, credits - because the whole audience knows them and a laboured translation would cost clarity. Names and quoted words stay as they are.
The test: ask what the word is doing. If it is doing meaning, keep it and gloss it once. If it is doing group membership, cut it, because the group in the room is not just her class.
One English word can be a deliberate signal. Three in a sentence is a habit, and the audience hears the habit.
3. What should Tupou do about the bird heliaki before Thursday?
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A heliaki works by indirection: the words name one thing, and the audience supplies the second meaning from context, occasion and shared knowledge. That is why an image found online cannot be assessed from the text alone - she has the image but not the reading.
Steps. (1) State the intended meaning in one sentence; if she cannot, she does not own it. (2) Ask a teacher or an elder from her grandmother's village what a bird flying out to sea signals there, and in what setting it is appropriate - some images attach to particular people and occasions, and a borrowed image can inadvertently point at someone in the room. (3) Check that the rest of the speech supports the reading the audience will take, not only the one she intended.
Decision rule. If she cannot explain it in one sentence and defend it in a second, cut it. A misread heliaki is worse than plain speech, because the audience hears the error and stops listening to the argument.