How to write a speech

Most speech-writing advice is essay advice wearing a hat. It tells you to know your audience, hook them early, and end with impact — all true, all things you already suspected, and none of it explains why the draft you were happy with on Sunday collapses when you stand up and say it on Monday.

The reason is mechanical. Writing and speaking produce different sentences. Typed at a keyboard, you build long, nested, comma-spliced constructions that a reader can re-read at their own pace. A listener gets one pass, in real time, at whatever speed you happen to be going. A speech is not a document that gets read aloud — it is a spoken performance that happens to have been written down first, and the drafting method has to reflect that.

Here is the order this guide works through:

1. Name the one sentence you want the room repeating afterwards, before you write anything else.
2. Set your length budget — minutes, then words, then words per section.
3. Outline three points that earn that one sentence, each stated in a single plain line.
4. Pick the shape that matches what you want to happen afterwards — three equal points is the default, not the only option — and fill in the template.
5. Draft it out loud, speaking and transcribing rather than typing.
6. Write the opening last but rehearse it first, and make it a moment rather than a topic.
7. Write a close that returns to the opening, not one that summarises the middle.
8. Run the rewrite-for-the-ear pass over the whole draft — sentence length, subject-verb distance, pronouns, numbers.
9. Decide what is scripted and what is bullets, then time a full read at real speaking pace.

Why is writing a speech different from writing an essay?

Because your reader can go back and your listener cannot. That single constraint drives every other rule in this guide.

An essay reader who loses the thread scrolls up. A listener who loses the thread is simply gone — and worse, they are gone silently, so you get no signal until the Q&A is strange. Everything that makes written prose efficient works against you here: subordinate clauses, pronouns that refer three sentences back, precise numbers, parenthetical qualifications, long noun phrases.

There is a second difference that matters more than it sounds. An essay is finished when it is correct. A speech is finished when it is sayable — when you can get through it at a natural pace without running out of breath, tripping over a construction, or hearing yourself sound like a document. That is a physical test, not an editorial one, and you cannot run it silently at a desk.

How long should a speech be, and how many words is that?

Start from time, not from pages. You are almost always given minutes — five at a wedding, ten at a conference, three for a toast — and the word count follows from your speaking rate.

The reference point is well established: conversational English runs around 150 words per minute.

~150 wpm

Source: National Center for Voice and Speech

Write to 130, not 150. The gap is deliberate and it is where most over-running speeches die. A prepared speech delivered well is slower than conversation: you pause between points, you let a number land, you wait out a laugh, and you take breaths you never notice in a chat. Drafting at 130 words per minute builds that room in. Drafting at 150 produces a script you can only finish by rushing — and talking too fast is the most common delivery fault there is.

Speech length	Words at ~130 wpm	Opening	Body	Close
2 minutes (a toast)	~260	~40	~180 (one point)	~40
3 minutes	~390	~55	~275 (two points)	~60
5 minutes	~650	~85	~480 (three points, ~160 each)	~85
10 minutes	~1,300	~150	~1,000 (three points, ~330 each)	~150
20 minutes	~2,600	~250	~2,100 (three to five points)	~250

Two rules hold across every row. The opening and close together take 10–15% of the total — they feel like they should be longer and they should not be. And the number of points stays at three for anything under ten minutes, no matter how much you know. A five-minute speech with five points is not a thorough speech; it is a list nobody will remember.

How do you write a speech outline?

Before any sentence gets drafted, the whole speech should fit on one index card. That card is the outline, and it has four lines on it.

1. The one sentence. What do you want someone to say to a colleague the next morning when asked what you talked about? Write that sentence in plain words. If you cannot, you do not have a speech yet — you have a subject.
2. Point one. A single plain line.
3. Point two. A single plain line.
4. Point three. A single plain line.

Then apply one test to each of the three: does it earn the one sentence, or does it merely relate to it? Most weak speeches are three things loosely orbiting a topic rather than three things building an argument. Anything that only relates gets cut, however much you like it.

Order the three deliberately. The strongest point goes first if you need to establish credibility with a sceptical room, and last if you are building to a call to action with a friendly one. The weakest goes in the middle either way — that is the position the room remembers least, which is exactly what you want for your weakest material.

Each point wants the same internal shape: claim, evidence, so-what. State it, back it with one concrete thing (a number, a story, a demonstration — one, not three), then say explicitly what it means for the people in front of you. The so-what is the line people skip, and it is the line that makes a point land rather than merely register. If your evidence is a story, storytelling in public speaking covers the spine that keeps it from wandering; if it is a technical idea, how to explain complex ideas simply covers how to make it survive contact with a non-expert room.

Which speech structure should you use?

Three roughly equal points is the default because it is the most forgiving shape in the room: if one point lands badly the other two still carry you. But it is a default, not a law, and forcing a persuasive case or a process walkthrough into three equal boxes is why some drafts feel oddly flat even though every individual paragraph is fine.

Pick the shape from the thing you want to happen afterwards.

Shape	Use it when	The beats
Three equal points	Informative talk, keynote, class assignment — the room mainly needs to understand something	One sentence → point → point → point → callback
Problem → solution	A pitch, a proposal, an internal case for change	Cost of today → why it persists → what you are proposing → what you need from them
Monroe's Motivated Sequence	Persuasive speech where the room has to actually do something	Attention → need → satisfaction → visualisation → action
Chronological	A demonstration, a how-to talk, a "how we got here" update	Step or era in order, with the turning point signposted out loud
Before / after / bridge	Motivational, award acceptance, graduation	Where we were → where we are now → the one thing that got us across
Advantage / disadvantage	A decision talk where someone else decides	The case for → the case against → what you would do and why

Monroe's Motivated Sequence is worth knowing by name — it is a five-step persuasive pattern developed by Alan Monroe at Purdue in the 1930s and it is still the standard skeleton taught for speeches that end in a request (Monroe's motivated sequence, 1930s). Its value is the fourth beat, visualisation, which almost nobody includes unprompted: before you ask, you describe what the world looks like once they have said yes. A request without that beat is an instruction, and rooms resist instructions.

Whichever shape you pick, the word budget from the section above still applies — you just divide it by the number of beats rather than always by three. A five-minute Monroe speech is roughly 650 words across five beats, so attention and action get about 80 words each and the three middle beats get about 160. Write the beat lengths on the card next to the beat names; it stops the need section from eating the speech, which is the failure mode of every persuasive draft ever written.

Is there a speech template you can just fill in?

Yes — and here is one, sized for five minutes at roughly 650 words. Fill the brackets in your own words, out loud, in this order. The whole thing should fit on one card before you write a single full sentence.

The one sentence: [what you want someone repeating tomorrow morning]

Opening — about 80 words. [The moment: one specific thing that happened, to someone with a name, at a time you can state. Not "today I want to talk about…"]

Point one — about 160 words. [Claim in one plain line.] [One piece of evidence — a number, a story, or a demonstration. One, not three.] [So-what: what this means for the people in this room.]

Point two — about 160 words. [Claim.] [Evidence.] [So-what.]

Point three — about 160 words. [Claim.] [Evidence.] [So-what.]

Close — about 80 words. [Return to the opening moment and finish it.] [The one sentence again, in the same words as the top.] [If there is an ask, it goes here in a single imperative sentence.]

Two things to notice about the template, because they are the difference between a filled-in worksheet and a speech.

The first is that the word counts are doing real work. Openings bloat and closes get squeezed, in every draft, by everyone. Writing "about 80 words" next to the opening is what stops you spending ninety seconds on context before the room has any reason to care.

The second is that filling this in silently, at a keyboard, will produce a document — a well-organised one, and one that will still fall apart in your mouth. The template is a container for the out-loud draft described in the next section, not a replacement for it. Speak each bracket, transcribe what you said, then move to the next. If you have ever searched for someone to just write your speech for you, this is the honest version of that: the structure can be handed to you, but the sentences have to come out of your own mouth before they will go back into it cleanly.

How to write a speech by saying it out loud

This is the step that separates a speech that sounds like you from one that sounds like a report being read. Do not type the first draft. Speak it.

Open a voice recorder or any dictation app, look at your four-line outline, and talk through the whole thing as if someone were in the room. Do not stop to fix anything. Ramble where you ramble. When you are done, transcribe it — phone dictation does this automatically, and the transcript is your actual first draft.

It will look rough. That is the point: it is rough in exactly the places your delivery is rough, which a typed draft would have hidden from you until you were standing up. What you get in exchange is enormous. The sentence lengths are already sayable. The rhythm is yours. The words are ones you can actually pronounce under pressure — nobody spontaneously says "leverage" or "utilise" out loud, but plenty of people type them. And the explanations that came out fluently are the ones you genuinely understand; the ones that came out as mush are the ones you have not thought through yet, which is information you want on day one rather than the night before.

Then edit the transcript rather than replacing it. Cut the false starts, tighten the rambles, promote the sentence you accidentally said well into the position it deserves. Speak-and-edit three or four times and you converge on something that is simultaneously drafted and half-rehearsed — which is why this method folds neatly into the practice loop in how to improve public speaking rather than sitting in front of it.

What does the rewrite-for-the-ear pass actually change?

Once you have a draft, run one pass whose only job is to make it sayable. Four mechanical checks, in this order:

• Sentence length. Anything over about 25 words gets split. Vary what is left — a run of uniformly short sentences is as hard to listen to as a run of long ones, because the rhythm stops carrying meaning.
• Subject-verb distance. Put the subject and its verb next to each other. A listener holds an unresolved subject in working memory, and every word you put between the two is a word of tax.
• Pronouns. Replace most of them with the actual noun. "It" is free to write and expensive to hear, because your listener has to look backwards to resolve it and loses the sentence you are currently saying.
• Numbers. Round them, and give each one a comparison. "Forty-one point seven per cent" is unhearable. "More than four in ten — so, this row of the room" is not.

Here is the pass on one real sentence. Before, typed for the eye:

Although the onboarding improvements we shipped in Q3, which were originally scoped as a fix for the activation drop-off that support had been flagging since May, delivered a 41.7% reduction in first-week churn, they have not yet been extended to the enterprise tier.

After, rewritten for the ear:

In May, support started flagging the same complaint: new users were dropping off in week one. We shipped a fix in Q3. First-week churn fell by more than four in ten. Enterprise customers still do not have it.

Same facts, same length, roughly. But the second version is four sentences instead of one, every subject sits next to its verb, the pronoun "they" is gone, the number is rounded and comparable, and the chronology runs forwards instead of being reassembled out of a subordinate clause. Read both out loud once and the difference is not subtle.

How do you write the opening?

Write it last, and rehearse it first. Openings written before the body tend to describe a speech you have not settled on yet, which is where "Today I'd like to talk about…" comes from.

The rule that does most of the work: open with the moment, not the topic. A topic sentence tells the room what category the next ten minutes belong to. A moment puts them inside it and earns the topic sentence for free.

• Topic: "Today I want to talk about how our onboarding is failing new users."
• Moment: "Last Tuesday, a new hire spent forty minutes stuck on a form our onboarding never mentions."

Both introduce the same speech. Only one makes anyone look up. Whatever you choose — a scene, a number that does not sound possible, a question the room is already privately asking — the test is that it should be impossible to deliver while the audience is still checking their phones. A full treatment of the openers that work in a formal setting is in how to start a presentation.

Two things not to put in an opening: an apology of any kind ("I'm not really a speaker", "I only got this on Friday"), and a preview of your own structure in a speech under ten minutes. In a long conference talk, signposting helps. In a five-minute speech it spends your most valuable eighty-five words describing the speech instead of giving it.

How do you write the close?

Return to the opening. That is the whole technique, and it beats every summary-based ending.

If you opened with the new hire stuck on a form, close with what changes for that person once the fix ships. If you opened with a number, close with what the number becomes. The callback does two things a "so, in conclusion" cannot: it tells the room unmistakably that you are finished — which is why people stop stranding themselves in the awkward "…yeah, that's it" — and it leaves them holding the one image you most want them to keep, rather than a recap of everything you said.

Then stop. The most common drafting error in a close is writing past the ending: landing the callback, and then adding a thank-you paragraph, an acknowledgements list, and a final qualification that quietly undoes the point. Write the last line, read what comes after it, and delete it. How to end a presentation covers the closing moves in more depth, including where a call to action goes when you have one.

What does a finished five-minute speech look like?

Method is easier to trust when you can see the output. Here is a complete five-minute speech — 640 words, three points, a callback close — written to the template above. The setting is an internal all-hands; the one sentence is "our status meeting is where our decisions go to wait."

Last Tuesday at 10:40, Priya sent a message that said: "still blocked, will raise it Thursday."

Thursday was the status meeting. So a decision that took about four minutes to make sat still for two days, because the only place we make decisions happens once a week at ten in the morning.

I want to talk about that gap. Our status meeting is where our decisions go to wait.

Here is the first thing. We are not slow at deciding. We are slow at getting to deciding. I went back through the last six weeks of Thursday agendas. Thirty-one items. Twenty-four of them were one person telling everyone something. Seven needed a decision, and those seven took an average of five minutes each once they came up.

So thirty-five minutes of the week are the meeting. The rest is a newsletter we read to each other. And it is the newsletter that sets the pace, because everything queues behind it.

Here is the second thing. The queue costs more than the meeting does. Priya's block was two days. Two days is not a disaster on its own. But it happened four times last month that I know about, to four different people, and every one of them did the same sensible thing: parked the work, picked up something else, came back on Thursday. That is eight days of momentum, spread thin enough that nobody reported it as a problem.

Nobody escalates a two-day wait. That is exactly why it keeps happening.

Here is the third thing. The fix is not a better meeting. We have tried a better meeting. We tried a timebox, we tried a pre-read, we tried moving it to Monday. Every version still had the same property: one weekly door.

What we need is more doors. So here is what I am proposing. The status half goes in writing on Wednesday, and nobody reads it aloud. The decision half becomes a twenty-minute slot that any of us can call, any day, with whoever the decision actually needs — usually two or three people, not eleven.

Picture the Tuesday version of Priya's week. She is blocked at 10:40. She calls the slot. Two of us show up at eleven. She is unblocked before lunch, and none of you ever hear about it, because it never became something to hear about.

That is the whole change. Our status meeting is where our decisions go to wait — and it does not have to be.

I need one thing from you today: try it for three weeks. Wednesday writing, decisions on demand. If in three weeks we have not moved faster, we put Thursday back and I will be the one to say so.

Read it out loud once, with a stopwatch. Then notice what it is doing, because these are the things the rewrite pass in this guide is actually for.

• The opening is a moment, not a topic. A name, a timestamp, a quoted sentence. Nobody is told what the speech will be about until after they already care.
• The one sentence appears three times — in the opening, at the hinge before the proposal, and in the close — in exactly the same words each time. Repetition of the thesis reads as clumsy on the page and lands as clarity in the ear.
• The numbers are rounded and small. Thirty-one items, seven decisions, five minutes, two days, three weeks. No decimals, no percentages, nothing a listener has to hold in working memory.
• Every point has a so-what line of its own — "it is the newsletter that sets the pace", "nobody escalates a two-day wait". Those are the lines people quote afterwards.
• The visualisation beat is doing the persuading. "Picture the Tuesday version of Priya's week" arrives before the ask, and the ask itself is one imperative sentence with a named exit condition.
• The longest sentence is about 25 words and almost every sentence puts its subject and verb next to each other. That is what makes it sayable in one breath rather than merely correct.

Swap the situation for yours and the skeleton holds. What does not transfer is the wording, and that is the point — the wording has to come from your own mouth.

What should you script word for word, and what should stay bullets?

A full script is a trap and a full improvisation is a different trap. The mix that works for almost everyone:

• Script word for word: the opening, the close, any number you quote, and the one sentence you most want repeated. These are the moments where improvising costs you most, and they are short enough to know cold.
• Keep as bullets: everything in between. One line per point, plus a keyword for the evidence under it. This keeps you assembling sentences live, which sounds like a person talking rather than a person reciting.
• Write out but do not memorise: any explanation you find genuinely hard. Drafting it precisely forces the thinking; delivering it from a bullet keeps it alive. The precision survives even when the wording does not.

The reason to hold the middle loosely is recoverability. A memorised middle has one path through it, so losing your place means losing the thread entirely — see what to do when your mind goes blank for the recovery. A bulleted middle has many paths, so a stumble costs you a sentence instead of a minute. How to memorize a speech covers how to lock the scripted parts down without turning the whole thing rigid. If the occasion really does call for a full script, such as a eulogy or a statement where every word is checked, see how to read a speech for the layout and rehearsal that stop it sounding read.

How do you write a speech for a specific occasion?

The structure above holds everywhere. What changes is the weighting and the tone.

Occasion	What changes	Length
Wedding or best man speech	One story, told properly, beats five anecdotes. Warmth over jokes; land on the couple, not on you.	3–5 min
Eulogy	Specifics, not adjectives. One small habit of theirs says more than a paragraph of praise. Write in a breath pause after the hardest line.	3–7 min
Work update or all-hands	Conclusion first, then the reasoning. Executives want the answer before the method.	3–10 min
Conference talk	One idea, three points, a demo or story per point. Cut your second-favourite idea entirely.	20–40 min
Graduation or award acceptance	Thank specifically and briefly, then give them one usable thing. Gratitude lists are the format's main failure mode.	2–5 min
School or class assignment	Follow the brief's structure literally, then make the opening a moment. Most classmates will open with the topic.	3–5 min

Two notes that apply to the emotional ones. Write the hardest sentence of a eulogy or a wedding speech down word for word even though you will not need the rest scripted — it is the sentence your voice is most likely to go on, and having it in front of you means you only have to read, not compose. And rehearse those out loud more, not less; the first time you say a sentence about someone you love should not be into a microphone. How to not cry during a speech turns that into a method: finding the trigger lines, rewriting them to report rather than relive, and wearing them down in rehearsal until they stop landing. How to stop your voice from shaking covers what to do when it happens anyway.

How do you know the draft is finished?

Not when it reads well. Run these four tests, all of them out loud:

1. Time a full run at real pace. Not a fast read — the pace you will actually use, with the pauses. If it runs long, cut a point rather than trimming words evenly across all three; evenly trimmed speeches lose their evidence first and turn into assertions.
2. Say it without looking, and see what survives. Whatever you remember without the page is the speech. Whatever vanishes was probably decoration.
3. Check you can breathe it. Mark where you actually inhale. If any sentence has no natural breath in it, it is too long, no matter how it scores on the page. Deliberate pauses are part of the draft, not an accident of delivery — how to use pauses when speaking covers where to put them.
4. Read the one sentence to someone and ask what they think it is about. If their answer is not your one sentence, the problem is the outline, not the wording, and no amount of polishing the prose will fix it.

Only after those four does the draft become a delivery problem, which is where how to give a presentation picks up.

Key takeaways

• Write for one listening pass, not for a reader who can scroll back.
• Budget ~130 words per minute, not 150 — a delivered speech is slower than conversation.
• Keep the opening and close to 10–15% of the total, and hold to three points under ten minutes.
• Get the whole speech onto one index card — one sentence plus three lines — before drafting.
• Draft by speaking and transcribing, then edit the transcript. Do not type the first draft.
• Run a rewrite-for-the-ear pass: split long sentences, close subject-verb gaps, kill pronouns, round numbers.
• Open with a moment rather than a topic, and close by returning to that moment.
• Script the opening, close and numbers; keep the middle as bullets so a stumble costs a sentence, not a minute.
• The draft is finished when you can time it, breathe it, and someone else can repeat your one sentence back.

Frequently asked questions

How many words is a 5 minute speech?

About 650 words, if you write to a delivered pace of roughly 130 words per minute. Calculators that use the conversational average of 150 wpm will tell you 750, and that is the number that makes people over-run: a prepared speech is slower than conversation because you pause between points, let numbers land, and take breaths you never notice in a chat. Draft 650 and time a real run. If it comes in at four and a half minutes you have room; if it comes in at six you were reading, not speaking.

How long should a speech be?

As long as you were given and no longer — running over is the fastest way to lose a room's goodwill. Within that, match the number of points to the time: one point for a two-minute toast, two for three minutes, three for five to twenty minutes. Beyond about twenty minutes attention drops sharply regardless of quality, so anything longer needs a change of format — questions, a demo, a second voice — rather than more speech.

How do you write a speech outline?

Four lines on one index card: the single sentence you want the room repeating tomorrow, then three points that earn it. Test each point by asking whether it earns that sentence or merely relates to it, and cut the ones that only relate. Give each point the same internal shape — claim, one piece of concrete evidence, and an explicit so-what. If the whole speech will not fit on the card, it is not outlined yet.

What should you include in a speech?

One controlling idea, three points that support it, one concrete piece of evidence per point, an opening that puts the room inside a moment, and a close that returns to it. What to leave out matters just as much: opening apologies, a structural preview in anything under ten minutes, more than one piece of evidence per point, and any sentence that comes after your actual last line.

Should you write a speech word for word or from bullet points?

Both, in different places. Script the opening, the close, any number you quote, and the one sentence you most want remembered — those are short and they are where improvising costs the most. Keep the middle as bullets so you are assembling sentences live, which sounds like a person talking instead of a person reciting, and so a stumble costs you one sentence rather than the thread.

What are the best speech writing tips for a beginner?

Say it before you type it. Almost every beginner problem — sentences too long to breathe, words you would never use out loud, a draft that feels stiff in the mouth — comes from writing for the eye and then reading the result aloud. Record yourself talking through your outline, transcribe it, and edit that. The second tip is to cut to three points, because over-stuffing is the other universal beginner fault.

Is there a speech template you can just fill in?

Yes, and there is one in this guide. For five minutes it is: the one sentence, an 80-word opening moment, three 160-word points each built as claim plus one piece of evidence plus an explicit so-what, and an 80-word close that returns to the opening. Fill the brackets out loud rather than at a keyboard — a template filled in silently produces a well-organised document that still falls apart in your mouth.

What is the best structure for a persuasive speech?

Monroe's Motivated Sequence: attention, need, satisfaction, visualisation, action. It beats three-equal-points for any speech that ends in a request, almost entirely because of the fourth beat — you describe what the world looks like after they say yes, before you ask. Speakers skip visualisation by instinct, which turns a request into an instruction, and rooms push back on instructions.

How do you write a speech in one night?

Cut the sittings, not the steps. Twenty minutes on the one sentence and three points, thirty minutes talking the draft out loud into a transcript, thirty on the rewrite-for-the-ear pass, then two timed runs. What you lose by compressing it is the overnight gap that exposes a weak point, so buy that back cheaply: read the one sentence to one other person and ask what they think the speech is about. If their answer is not your sentence, fix the outline — not the wording — even at midnight.

How long does it take to write a speech?

For a five-minute speech, budget about two hours of writing spread over two or three sittings, plus rehearsal. The outline takes twenty minutes, the spoken draft and transcript about thirty, and the rewrite-for-the-ear pass another thirty — but the gaps between sittings do real work, because the weak point you could not see on Tuesday is obvious on Wednesday. Writing it in one sitting the night before is possible and almost always shows.

Conclusion

A speech is not a document you read out — it is a transcript of a talk you have not given yet, and the fastest way to write one is to give it badly first and edit what comes out. Set the word budget, get it onto one index card, then put the keyboard away and start talking. The draft you speak into existence is already half-rehearsed, which is the only kind worth having.