Speak for a Minute

One minute is about a hundred and twenty words. That is four or five sentences at a comfortable speaking pace — and almost nobody can produce them on demand about a subject they were handed four seconds earlier.

That is the only skill this book teaches, and it is a skill rather than a talent. Two hundred topics, and for every one of them the answer written out in full.

Every topic gives you four things: the question as somebody would really ask it; a three-line plan, which is what you build in the four seconds you are given; a complete model answer at the length of a minute of speech; and three sentence frames worth stealing.

Every answer is the same three beats. Answer the question in the first sentence. Give one specific thing — a number, a name, a morning, an object. Then go somewhere the listener did not expect. That shape fits a question about your hometown, a question about whether examinations are fair, and a question consisting of one abstract word, and the whole book is two hundred demonstrations of it.

About you. Your name, your family, your home, your work, your studies, a typical day, what you are good at and what you are not, how you sleep, how you handle money.

Places, people, things and the past. A city, a journey, a street, a view. A friend, a teacher, a neighbour, a stranger who helped you, somebody you find difficult. A possession, a gift, a photograph, something that broke, something you lost. An early memory, a mistake, a difficult day, a decision, a time you said no.

Everyday life. Shopping, cooking, getting to work, exercise, housework, the internet, films, music, the news, weekends, reading, eating out, being on time, and doing nothing.

Questions with no right answer. Twenty contested questions where every answer takes a side, gives one real reason, and then concedes the strongest point on the other side — which is the technique that separates a good answer from a school one.

Work and study. Interview answers built on incidents with dates and numbers rather than on qualities: your strongest quality, something you are working on, a deadline you missed, a disagreement, feedback you did not enjoy, why you are leaving.

The future and the imaginary, where the whole grammar of would and if I were is practised under pressure.

And the hard ones. Patience. Luck. Failure. Silence. Rules. Waiting. Promises. Boredom. Forgiveness. Habit. Distance. Memory. Noise. Choice. Repair. Honesty. Endings.

At the back: how to practise in twelve minutes a day; twenty-four ways to buy yourself a second; what to say while you think and what not to; twelve ways round a word you do not have; sixteen ways to begin and eight ways to stop; and what to do with a question you have never seen.

Every answer is written as a different person — different countries, ages, jobs and lives — so that the book teaches a shape rather than a voice. None of them is meant to be memorised, and the book says so on its own first page.

200 topics · 200 model answers · 600 phrases to steal