Part 4: SPEAKER’S REFERENCE

• Provide more than your own personal opinions or experiences.
• Illustrate each main point with several different types of supporting material.

• Choose evidence and sources based on audience factors.
• Remember that not every source is appropriate for every audience.

• Seek out compelling examples to illustrate or describe your ideas.
• Share stories, either real or hypothetical, to drive your point home.
• Use firsthand findings in the form of testimony.
• Hunt for relevant facts or documented occurrences.
• Consider whether you need statistics, or quantified evidence.
• Draw your statistics from reliable sources and present them in context.
• Beware of cherry-picking and other unethical ways of presenting data.

• Make it a priority to establish your source’s trustworthiness and reliability.
• Emphasize your source’s qualifications.

• Use sources appropriate to the rhetorical situation.
• Consider a mix of credible primary and secondary sources.

• Library portals provide an entry point for sources that have been vetted for quality.
• Portals and virtual libraries allow you access the invisible Web.

• Use personal knowledge and experiences.
• Search online digital collections

• Prepare questions in advance.
• Avoid vague, leading, and loaded questions.
• Use active listening strategies such as paraphrasing.
• Distribute surveys.

• Investigate books on the topic.
• Search newspapers and periodicals.
• Check blogs and social news sites.
• Consult government publications.
• Make use of reference works (e.g., encyclopedias, almanacs, biographical resources, books of quotations, poetry collections, and atlases).

• Consult subject guides on a library’s home page.
• Use general and specialized search engines for different purposes.

• Create effective keywords with fewer words, quotation marks, Boolean operators, nesting, and truncation.
• Use correct subject headings and use them to search library databases.
• Use advance search fields, such as language, country, domain, and date range to narrow returns.

• Evaluate authorship, sponsorship, and currency of source.
• Distinguish information from propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation.

• Credit information drawn from other people’s ideas.
• Information that is common knowledge need not be credited.

• Cite author or origin of source.
• Cite type of source (e.g., article, book, personal interview).
• Cite title or description of source.
• Cite date of creation or publication.

• If the source is affiliated with a respected institution, identify it.
• If citing a study linked to a reputable institution, identify it.
• If a source has relevant credentials, note them.
• If the source has relevant real-life experience, mention it.

• Vary the wording.
• Discuss the issue and then reveal the source.

• Put facts and statistics in context.