No matter where you gather evidence for your speech (library, Internet, or interviews), you must ensure that each is a credible source—one that can be reasonably trusted to be accurate and objective. When you use the most credible sources possible, you can be confident that the facts you present are valid, and your audience will be more likely to accept your claims.7

To evaluate the credibility of a given source, examine four distinguishing characteristics—expertise, objectivity, observational capacity, and recency.