A primary source for a speech may be your own personal experience; a firsthand account found in letters, diaries, old newspapers, photographs, or other sources, often housed in a library’s digital collection; or interviews or surveys that you conduct yourself.

Consider Personal Knowledge and Experience

Used effectively, your own knowledge and experience about your topic can serve important functions in a speech, drawing in listeners and creating a sense of connection with them. Sharing experiences and observations about work you’ve done, people you’ve known, or places you’ve visited can add a dimension of authenticity and credibility that a secondhand source might not. Speaking on child labor abuses among fruit growers in the San Joaquin Valley in California, for example, a speaker might relate his or her own experience of working as a migrant worker alongside parents.

Depending on your topic and the amount of your direct involvement with it, personal knowledge and experience can play a smaller or larger role in a speech. However much information you choose to share, consider whether your experiences will truly clarify and increase the audience’s understanding of the topic, omitting anything that does not accomplish this. Keep in mind too that audiences look for a balance of evidence, including other people’s expert knowledge and analysis (see Chapter 8 on types of supporting material).

Access Digital Collections

A chief source of primary speech materials are the many online digital collections of the world’s libraries. Nearly all libraries now offer digital collections, which are generally organized by topic, material type, time period, and geographic area. Housed within these online repositories are oral histories, letters, old newspapers; photographs, prints, and paintings; and audio and video recordings.

Material drawn from these collections can add great color and depth to speeches on many topics. A presentation on early African American actors, for example, might include a passage from a diary of a nineteenth-century actor and a photograph of him or her on stage. One way to discover a digital collection related to your topic is to enter your topic terms into a general search engine (e.g., African American actors AND digital collections).

Conduct Interviews

Oftentimes you can glean considerably more insight into a topic, and get more compelling material to bring to your audience, by speaking personally to someone who has expertise on the subject. In an interview, you pose questions to someone, either in person or via correspondence, to learn about some aspect of his or her experience (you can also use interviews to investigate your audience; see Chapter 6). Consider how an interview of someone who has completed a 26-mile marathon, for example, could bring the topic of long-distance running alive in ways that a magazine article might not do.

Preparing for the Interview

People often make the mistake of treating an interview as they would a conversation, assuming that things will “just flow.” In fact, getting the information you need from a subject really does require research and advance planning. Begin by learning about the person you will be interviewing so that you can prepare appropriate and informed questions for him or her. Familiarize yourself with the interviewee’s background and, if appropriate, review relevant publications.

Prepare your questions in advance of the date, and word them carefully:

Structuring the Interview

Think about an interview as having the same broad structure as a speech, with an introduction (opening), a body (questions), and a conclusion (closing).

The Opening: Establish a Spirit of Collaboration    A shared sense of purpose is crucial in the interview setting, so focus on creating a positive first impression:

The Body: Posing the Questions    Once you’ve established rapport and agreed upon goals, begin asking your substantive questions. Use your prepared questions as a guide, but allow the interviewee to introduce new topics and elaborate as he or she sees fit.

The Closing: Recheck and Confirm    Too often, people who conduct interviews end them in haste. Before ending the interview, recheck your notes and, if necessary, confirm them:

Recording the Interview

More than one interview has gone wonderfully—and entirely unrecorded. As a result, the interviewer must reconstruct from memory what was said, with the result usually being a slew of inaccuracies. Avoid this pitfall by taking detailed notes, recording the interview, or using a combination of note taking, recording, and videotaping. To establish an air of authenticity, you might even decide to replay short excerpts during your speech.

Distribute Surveys

A survey can be useful as both a tool to investigate audience attitudes (see Chapter 6) and a source of primary material for your speech. Surveys are an especially effective source for speech topics focused on the attitudes and behavior of people in your immediate environment, such as fellow students’ opinions on issues on or off campus or community members’ attitudes toward local initiatives (for guidelines on creating surveys, refer to Chapter 6.)

Remember, however, that any informal survey you conduct is unlikely to be statistically sound enough to be taken as actual proof of your claims. Present your findings to the audience in a manner that acknowledges this, and consider shoring up any informal survey research you conduct with other forms of support. (See Chapter 8 for a discussion of using statistics in speeches.)