Citing Sources in Your Speech

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CHAPTER 10

If you’ve ever challenged a speeding ticket in traffic court, you may not be surprised to learn that people rarely win their appeals without offering strong evidence to support their case.1 Much the same can be said of convincing audience members to accept your speech points. Research confirms that when you back up your claims with evidence, audience members are more likely to process and accept them than if you make unsupported assertions.2 Alerting the audience to the sources you use, as well as offering ones that they will find authoritative, is thus a critical aspect of delivering a speech or presentation. When you credit speech sources, you:

  • Increase the odds that audience members will believe in your message.
  • Demonstrate the quality and range of your research to listeners.
  • Demonstrate that reliable sources support your position.
  • Avoid plagiarism and gain credibility as an ethical speaker who acknowledges the work of others.
  • Enhance your own authority.
  • Enable listeners to locate your sources and pursue their own research on the topic.

As described in Chapter 5, ethically you are bound to attribute any information drawn from other people’s ideas, opinions, and theories—as well as any facts and statistics gathered by others—to their original sources. Remember, you need not credit sources for ideas that are common knowledge—established information likely to be known by many people and described in multiple places.