Respect the Available Time

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 your employer asked you to prepare a ten-minute podcast about best practices in urban agriculture. You might be tempted to include a four-minute narrative about how you came to be involved in this field, but this would take up almost half of your speaking time and cut into the available time for explaining best practices. You would need to find a different, shorter narrative that would help viewers to understand these methods.

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