How long will your marker take to read your essay? How long is your presentation if you speak it aloud? This reading time calculator estimates both from your word count, using standard reading and speaking speeds.
It counts your words in the browser and converts them to minutes at 200, 250 and 300 words per minute, plus a speaking estimate for talks and viva presentations.
Silent reading runs at roughly 200 to 250 words per minute for an adult reader on familiar material. Speaking aloud at a pace an audience can follow runs at about 130 to 150. That is close to half the speed, and mistaking one for the other is the usual reason a talk overruns.
Dense material slows both. Technical prose with unfamiliar terminology can drop silent reading to 150 words per minute, and a presentation full of equations or figures needs a slower delivery still, because the audience is reading the slide as well as listening to you.
As a working figure, ten minutes of speech is about 1,200 to 1,300 words and twenty minutes is around 2,600. Those numbers assume continuous talking, which no real presentation involves.
Subtract time for moving between slides, pausing after a key result, pointing at a figure and handling interruptions. Budgeting about 80% of your slot for the script leaves room for all of it and means you finish comfortably rather than racing your final slides.
An answer that runs past two minutes usually stops being an answer. Two minutes is roughly 250 spoken words, so prepared responses to predictable questions should be checked against that figure and trimmed.
The predictable questions are worth rehearsing: why this method, why this sample, what are the limitations, what would you change. A crisp ninety-second answer reads as command of the material; a rambling five-minute one reads as evasion even when the content is sound.
It counts words and divides by a rate, so it cannot know that a slide of results tables takes three minutes to talk through while a slide of narrative takes forty seconds. Long quotations, worked examples and anything requiring the audience to read along all take longer than the word count suggests.
Use it as a first pass, then rehearse aloud against a clock. Nearly everyone speaks faster under pressure, so a rehearsal that lands exactly on the limit will usually come in short on the day — which is the safer direction to be wrong in.
About 1,200 to 1,300 spoken words, and fewer once you allow for slides, pauses and questions.
Around 130 to 150 words per minute for a general audience. Slow down for technical material or where the audience is reading slides as you talk.
Silent reading runs at 200 to 250 words per minute; clear speech runs at roughly half that.
Under two minutes, which is about 250 spoken words. Prepare short answers to the predictable questions.
Yes. Nerves speed up delivery, so expect the live version to run slightly shorter than a calm rehearsal.