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Progress Pages For this and every project or proposal, I keep a Progress Page. It includes a link to the event/organization, submission requirements, important points-of-contact, dates and times, and (of course) my drafted, written content. I’m not saying that I write something new for every project. I don’t. That’s crazy and excessive and would kill me. What I do though, is start each project fresh. When writing, I keep every version or evolution of an idea separate; it allows the creative process to unfold for each unique story. Even if the bones of the idea are the same as a previous one (and I copy and paste some content), Progress Pages help me feel like I’m starting fresh. Also, if I’ve already worked on some content for that subject, I don’t have to delete anything to make room for rewrites, therefore losing a paragraph or phrase that might be useful later on. I get huge writer’s block and I’ve found that going backwards in time and re-reading Progress Pages helps me immensely! Once I had a written draft for my spoken story, I recorded myself (using Audacity) on my computer. I read straight from the page; I made no effort to memorize at this point. Reading it aloud while reading from a page also helped me make several good edits to grammar and flow. Written stories sound really different when spoken aloud. The requirement for this event was 6-minute stories. My first go was 3 min and 40 sec too long. I was shocked [read: not shocked] by this. I did two things to edit it down. I organized my story elements, and I adjusted my word count. A Story in a Pie Chart One way to edit a story down is to simplify the narrative; take out the nonessentials. At this point, instead of working within the narrative, I exited it completely and just started an outline of the story’s parts.* It went something like this.
*Soooome people with actual formal training might say that starting with an outline is a good idea. I am happy for those people. I thought about how much time, or how big a piece of the pie, each point really deserved. I thought, to fit my story into six minutes, a distribution of 15 sec (state the moral) - 2 min (world building) - 3 min (main events) - 30 sec (revelation) - 15 sec (restate the moral) made sense. Then, I took a word count of each of my sections to see where I was wasting time. Rate of Speech and wpm (words per minute) Here’s another way to edit a story down: figure out the words per minute. I googled ‘words per minute for a speech’ to see what my rate of speech should be. A lot of podcasters recommended 145-160 words per minute. Thanks to my own experience teaching and with public speaking, I am *well aware* that I am a fast talker. I was sure that 145-160 wpm would be very difficult for me and would sound unnatural. So, I aimed for 170-175 (which, honestly, still requires me to deliberately slow down). So, a six-minute speech at 170 words per minute would be 1,020 words when written. At this point, my story was 1,340 words. That helped me determine what I needed to do with my written draft to get to about six minutes of ‘Niki-talk’. Here are two ways to look at it: If you know what rate of speech feels natural to you and how long your speech needs to be, this is how you determine the word count of your speech: If you have a draft at a certain word count and you know how long your speech needs to be, this is how fast/slow you have to speak: Rehearse Backwards
Once I’ve got my written story done, it’s time to memorize it. A timed, live event is not the moment to ‘wing it’. Something that good symphony orchestras do is rehearse backwards. To prepare for a concert, they start with the ending of a song or the last movement of a piece. The same thing works for rehearsing a speech or story. Start by reading and memorizing the last sentence of the story. Then, go one more sentence in and memorize that, adding on the last sentence you’ve already memorized. By the time you get to the first sentence, you’ve already done the ending several times. This way, the ending or next sentence never feels like a surprise, instead, what you’re saying takes on forward momentum *into* the ending.
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This is Niki.Niki Cuccinotto is a consultant, science educator, and writer. Archives
May 2018
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