Before beginning your search, take a few moments to review your thesis statement and specific speech purpose (see Chapter 7, “Selecting a Topic and Purpose”). Consider what you need to support them. A little while spent on visualizing a research strategy will result in significant savings of time and energy that might otherwise be wasted in an untargeted search. What do you need to elaborate upon, explain, demonstrate, or prove? Perhaps you haven’t narrowed your topic sufficiently yet; use the audience analysis to do this and then decide upon a research strategy. What combination of personal knowledge, facts and statistics, stories or anecdotes, and testimony do your topic and purpose require? What kinds of sources will help you accomplish this? Different topics, audiences, purposes, and occasions will suggest a different balance of sources, so reflect on what might work best for your particular rhetorical situation.

Consider a Mix of Primary and Secondary Sources

Nearly all types of speeches can benefit from a mix of the two broad categories of supporting material: primary and secondary sources. Primary sources provide firsthand accounts or direct evidence of events, objects, or people (see this chapter). Secondary sources provide analysis or commentary about things not directly observed or created. These include the vast world of news, commentary, analysis, and scholarship found in books, articles, and a myriad of sources other than the original (see this chapter).

A speech that contains both primary and secondary sources can be more compelling and believable than one that relies on one source type alone. The firsthand nature of a credible primary source can build trust and engage audience members emotionally. Secondary sources can help listeners put the topic in perspective. A speech on an oil spill, for example, can command more attention if it includes testimony by oil riggers and other eyewitnesses (primary sources) along with analyses of the spill from magazines and newspapers (secondary sources).

Use a Library Portal to Access Credible Sources

Easy access to the Internet may lead you to rely heavily or even exclusively on sources you find through popular search engines such as Google or Bing. In doing so, however, you risk overlooking key sources not found on those sites and finding biased and/or false information. To circumvent this, begin your search at your school’s or town’s library portal, or electronic entry point into its holdings (e.g., the library’s home page).

As with its shelved material, a library’s e-resources are built through careful and deliberate selection processes by trained professionals. Librarians track, sort, and organize the millions of articles and book titles, both print and electronic, competing for your attention. They select only what is of value, according to well-defined standards and in consultation with the faculty at your school.¹ This holds true of the subscription databases and other resources you will find on a library’s portal. When you select speech material from a library’s resources, be it a quotation from an e-journal article, a statistic from a government publication, or an example from a nonfiction book, you can be assured that an information specialist has vetted that source for reliability and credibility. No such standards exist for popular Web search engines.

A key benefit of beginning your research at a library portal is the ability to access scholarly research articles and peer-reviewed journals, which contain some of the most cutting-edge and reliable research on almost any topic. Not only that, but libraries purchase access to proprietary databases and other resources that form part of the deep Web—the large portion of the Web that general search engines cannot access because the information is licensed and/or fee-based. For a list of resources typically found on library portals, see Table 9.1.