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Select supporting materials that you can comfortably fit into the time you have available for your speech. For a five- to ten-minute speech, for instance, you wouldn’t have time to use supporting materials that each take one minute or more to present—no matter how interesting and relevant they might be. To illustrate, suppose you were preparing a seven-minute speech about ecotourism in Central America. You may feel tempted to relate a four-minute narrative about the life lessons you learned while traveling throughout Central America, but this narrative would eat up more than half the time allotted for your speech. You would need to either streamline the narrative or replace it with a shorter but equally effective one.