Part 4: SPEAKER’S REFERENCE
SPEAKER’S REFERENCE
SUPPORTING THE SPEECH
Offer a Variety of Supporting Materials
- Provide more than your own personal opinions or experiences.
- Illustrate each main point with several different types of supporting material.
Keep the Audience in Mind When Selecting Sources
- Choose evidence and sources based on audience factors.
- Remember that not every source is appropriate for every audience.
Choose Accurate, Relevant, Motivating, and Audience-Centered Supporting Material
- 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.
Convince Listeners to Accept Your Supporting Material as Credible
- Make it a priority to establish your source’s trustworthiness and reliability.
- Emphasize your source’s qualifications.
Assess Your Research Needs
- Use sources appropriate to the rhetorical situation.
- Consider a mix of credible primary and secondary sources.
Start Your Search at Your Library’s Home Page
- Library portals provide an entry point for sources that have been vetted for quality.
- Portals and virtual libraries allow you access the invisible Web.
Consider Primary Sources
Gather Information through Interviews
- Prepare questions in advance.
- Avoid vague, leading, and loaded questions.
- Use active listening strategies such as paraphrasing.
- Distribute surveys.
Consider Various Secondary Sources
- 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).
Conduct Smart Searches
- Consult subject guides on a library’s home page.
- Use general and specialized search engines for different purposes.
Identify When to Use Keywords and Subject Headings to Retrieve the Best Results
- 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.
Critically Evaluate Sources
- Evaluate authorship, sponsorship, and currency of source.
- Distinguish information from propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation.
Cite Your Sources to Enhance Your Own Authority and Demonstrate Solid Support for Your Reasoning
- Credit information drawn from other people’s ideas.
- Information that is common knowledge need not be credited.
Offer Key Source Information
- 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.
Demonstrate the Source’s Trustworthiness
- 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.
Avoid a Mechanical Delivery of Sources
Credit Sources in Presentation Aids
KEY TERMS
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