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The art of public speaking

Researching and Supporting Your Speech

In the modern world, we have a lot of information at our fingertips and so research skills are more important than ever because our challenge is not accessing information but discerning what information is credible and relevant.

Finding Supporting Material

You must be familiar with what you want to talk about if you are to deliver a meaningful speech. studying the existing knowledge forms the first step of your research process. The amount of research and background studies depends on your level of familiarity with the topic you need to talk about.

Background research is just a review of summaries available for your topic that helps refresh or create your knowledge about the subject.

If you’ve thought of a topic to do your speech on, chances are that someone else has thought of it, too, and people have written and published about it and so consulting libraries can be very useful.

College and university libraries are often at the cutting edge of information retrieval for academic research.

Types of information sources

Different types of sources that may be relevant for your speech topic includes:

  • Periodicals:-include magazines and journals which are published periodically. If your searching for online periodicals, the results can be overwhelming and so you may need to may limit your search to results that have your keyword in the abstract which is the author-supplied summary of the source.
  • Newspapers and Books:-Newspapers are good for topics that are developing quickly, as they are updated daily. smaller local papers can also be credible and relevant if your speech topic doesn’t have national or international reach. Books are good for a variety of subjects and are useful for in-depth research that you can’t get as regularly from newspapers or magazines.
  • Reference Tools:- Dictionaries are handy tools when we aren’t familiar with a particular word. Citing a dictionary doesn’t show deep research skills. Reference sources like encyclopedias are excellent resources to get you informed about the basics of a topic and many of them are Internet based, which makes them convenient but they are still not primary sources.
  • Interviews:- When conducting an interview for a speech, you should access a person who has expertise in or direct experience with your speech topic. Previous employers, internship supervisors, teachers, community leaders, or even relatives may be appropriate interviewees, given your topic. After identifying a good interviewee, you will want to begin researching and preparing questions to ask them.
  • Websites:- some information may be better retrieved from websites.If you know there is an organization related to your topic, you may want to see if they have an official website. It is almost always better to get information from an official website because it is likely to be considered a primary source information.

Supporting Material

There are several types of supporting material that you can pull from the sources you find during the research process to add to your speech. These materials includes:

  • examples
  • explanations
  • statistics
  • analogies
  • testimony
  • visual aids
Examples

This is a cited case that is representative of a larger whole.

Examples are especially beneficial when presenting information that an audience may not be familiar with. They are also useful for repackaging or reviewing information that has already been presented. Examples can be used in many different ways, so you should let your audience, purpose and thesis, and research materials guide your use. You may pull examples directly from your research materials, making sure to cite the source.

Explanations

They clarify ideas by providing information about what something is, why something is the way it is, or how something works or came to be. One of the most common types of explanation is a definition. Many authors will define concepts as they use them in their writing, which is a good alternative to a dictionary definition. In your speech think about how much your audience knows about a given subject as you do not need to provide definitions when information is common knowledge. It is important to anticipate audience confusion and define legal, medical, or other forms of jargon as well as slang and unfamiliar words words or phrases.

Repeating a definition verbatim from a dictionary often leads to fluency hiccups, because definitions are not written to be read aloud but It is a good idea to put the definition into your own words

Consciously incorporating clear explanations into your speech can help you achieve your speech goals.

Statistics

Statistics are numerical representations of information. As a speaker, you can capitalize on the power of statistics if you use them appropriately. All statistics are contextual, so plucking a number out of a news article or a research study and including it in your speech without taking the time to understand the statistic is unethical.

Although statistics are popular as supporting evidence, they can also be boring especially to people in our audience who are not good at processing numbers. Even people good at numbers may find it difficult to follow a speech full of figures hence it is a good idea to avoid using too many statistics and to use startling examples when you do use them. Rounding off figures instead of giving exact figures and expressing them in format that audience can relate easily like percentage can be useful.

Analogies

involve a comparison of ideas, items, or circumstances like when you compare two things that actually exists. A figurative analogy compares things that are not normally related, often relying on metaphor, simile, or other figurative language devices; for example when we compare a battery that produces current to a pump that pumps water.

To use analogies effectively and ethically, you must choose ideas, items, or circumstances to compare that are similar enough to warrant the analogy.

Testimonies

This is quoted information from people with direct knowledge about a subject or situation.

Expert testimony is from people who are credentialed or recognized experts in a given subject.

Lay testimony is often a recounting of a person’s experiences, which is more subjective.

In courtrooms, Lawyers know that juries want to hear testimony from experts, eyewitnesses, and friends and family.

Visual Aids

This are things that help a speaker reinforce speech content visually helping amplify the speaker’s message.

skillfully incorporating visual aids into a speech has many potential benefits:

  • Helping your audience remember more information
  • Helping your audience understand information because it is made more digestible through diagrams, charts etc.
  • Helping your audience see something in action by demonstrating with an object, showing a video etc.
  • Engaging your audience by making your delivery more dynamic through demonstration, gesturing etc.

The visual aids you can use in a speech includes:

  • chalkboards
  • whiteboards and flip charts
  • posters and handouts
  • pictures
  • diagrams
  • charts
  • graphs
  • videos
  • presentation software.

Reference:  A Primer on Communication Studies, lardbucket.

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