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Research is often an effective way to begin your topic selection process. General newsmagazines, newspapers, and Web sites are great sources for subjects because they include articles on current events, science, geography and culture, famous people, and the arts. These resources will provide ideas for topics that are new to most audience members, or offer new perspectives on topic areas that may already be familiar to the audience. This can help you avoid repeating a message that many of your classmates have already heard. For example, you might read about new research suggesting that certain skills can be improved during sleep.¹ This focus would provide a new twist on the more general topic of sleep or the overdone topic of sleep cycles.

Many libraries keep recent periodicals and newspapers in easily accessible locations, and you can often find their accompanying sites on the Internet or through online library portals. You can also browse more broadly for topics online, but beware! As we noted in chapter 3, it is not ethical to plagiarize a speech. If these sites contain links to actual speeches, do not copy all or part of a speech (or use it after changing some of the words) and represent it as your own work.

The ideas you generate through research not only serve as potential speech topics themselves but also serve as starting points for other topic selection strategies, including brainstorming, word association, and mind mapping.