Researching Supporting Material

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Of course, the facts, statistics, anecdotes, and other supporting material that you want for your speech won’t come out of thin air. Now that you’ve got your list of ingredients for your speech, you’ll need to do some shopping—that is, you’ll need to go out and find the material. Here’s how.

Talk to People. If you’re looking for testimony, narratives, real-world examples, and anecdotes, you’ll need to start talking to people. You may be looking for experts in a particular field or people who have had firsthand experience with an event or occurrence; finding such individuals can be a challenge. You can try networking with people you know, as well as searching Internet resources.

You can also talk to people through surveys, which involve soliciting answers to a question or series of questions related to your topic from a broad range of individuals. Conducting a survey can give you a sense of how a group of people view a particular event, idea, or phenomenon. For example, if you are giving an informative speech on fear of terrorism in the United States, you might randomly select students on campus and ask them how safe they feel from terrorist attacks. Results from surveys can be discussed to back up your points.

Search the Literature. Published literature lets you reach beyond your own knowledge and experience and can be a valuable resource for supporting material for your speech. If you’re giving a speech on hip-hop music, for example, you’re likely to find some great material in the pages of a magazine like Vibe. If you’re looking for studies on mental-health issues affecting rescue workers after Hurricane Katrina, you might search through newspaper archives or scholarly journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine.

Most current publications are available in searchable databases in libraries; some can even be accessed via the Internet (though you may have to pay a fee to download complete articles). Such databases give you access to a wealth of stored information. The Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com), for example, is a great example of a commonly used database, and its comprehensive information on film, television, and video games is entirely free. Another type of secondary resource is a directory. Directories are created and maintained by people rather than automatically generated by computers. Because human editors compile them, directories often return fewer links but higher-quality results. Directories guide you to the main page of a Web site organized within a wider subject category. You can also access useful literature through library gateways—collections of databases and information sites arranged by subject, generally reviewed and recommended by experts (usually librarians). These gateway collections assist in your research and reference needs because they identify suitable academic pages on the Web. In addition to scholastic resources, many library gateways include links to specialty search engines for biographies, quotations, atlases, maps, encyclopedias, and trivia. There are also a number of “virtual libraries” that exist only on the Internet. Some well-known library gateways and directories are identified in Table 11.2.

Make the Internet Work for You. Twenty years ago, the first stop on any research mission would have been the library. Today, the Internet puts a multitude of information at your fingertips. Navigating the vast sea of information—not to mention misinformation—available on the Internet can be daunting, and even, without wise searching, a waste of time; solid knowledge of search tools can make your efforts more fruitful and efficient.

An Internet search engine is a program that indexes Web content. Search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, and Bing search all over the Web for documents containing specific keywords that you’ve chosen. Search engines have several advantages—they offer access to a huge number of publicly available Web pages and give you the ability to search through large databases. But they frequently return irrelevant links, and they don’t index the “invisible Web”—databases maintained by universities, businesses, the government, or libraries that cannot always be accessed by standard search engines. If a search engine fails to produce useful results, try a metasearch engine—a search engine that scans multiple search engines simultaneously. Metasearch technology delivers more relevant and comprehensive results than a search engine.