How many words is a 7 minute speech?

A 7 minute talk is about 1050 words at an average speaking pace of 150 words per minute. A deliberate 130 puts you at 910 words and a fast 170 puts you at 1190. Seven minutes is the long end of the lightning talk, which usually means a shared laptop, a queue of speakers behind you, and a host who cuts the mic. Budget six minutes of material for a seven minute slot. The minute you hold back covers the projector, the adapter, and the question somebody asks in the middle.

What fits in 7 minutes

This length is the conference lightning talk and the internal brown bag.

A thousand words carries two connected ideas, or one idea with a live demo attached. A lightning talk fits the problem, the thing you built, and about ninety seconds of demo. A brown bag fits three lessons from a project your team already knows by name, at roughly three hundred words each. Background the room already has is the first thing to cut.

A structure that fits

1. 1Cold open, 80 to 100 words. Start inside the problem and skip the agenda slide. 'Our deploy took nineteen minutes. Twelve of them were one npm install.'
2. 2Setup, 150 to 200 words. Only the context needed to follow the demo. Assume the room knows the domain.
3. 3The thing itself, 450 to 550 words. If you are demoing, narrate every click out loud, because the back row cannot read your terminal.
4. 4Results, 150 to 200 words. Before and after with real numbers, including whatever got worse.
5. 5Close and pointer, 60 to 80 words. One takeaway and where to find the code or the doc.

Before you deliver it

Rehearse the demo failing. Lightning talk slots run back to back on borrowed hardware, and the recovery you improvise on stage costs ninety seconds you do not have. Keep a screenshot version of the demo on the same machine and practice switching to it mid-sentence. Then time the talk twice at full volume, standing, with the laptop closed for the parts that run without it.