Page 202 - Between One and Many The Art and Science of Public Speaking

Chapter 7 Researching Your Message 169

face some specifi c constraints, such as a time limit and requirements for visual
aids. Within those limitations, you will make a number of decisions that guide
your research plan.
Given that your audience and general purpose are usually predetermined,
you will need to decide on a topic for your speech. In Chapter 2 we discussed
the standards for a good topic: it should be interesting to audience and speaker,
appropriate to the situation and to the available time, manageable, and worth-
while. Once you have a topic, you need to decide what you want the audience
to take away from your speech. Will they be able to do something they couldn’t
do before your speech? One of our students, for example, taught us the art of
folding a fi tted sheet (no, you don’t just roll it up in a ball). Will they be asked
to change their attitudes about an issue? Another of our students gave a speech
aimed at convincing her classmates to ditch their expensive bottled water and
instead attach a simple water fi lter to their faucet and get pure water for pennies
a glass. Whatever topic you pick, you need to be sure that information is readily
available for your speech. Sometimes a promising topic will turn out to be too
obscure or difficult to research in the time available. You will need to begin re-

search early enough to allow yourself the time to shift topics if necessary.
Often it is not until after you have begun your research that you discover there
is not enough information to meet the needs of your proposed presentation—or
there is so much information that an entire lecture series would be required to
adequately cover your original topic. Be flexible and willing to enlarge or shrink

the presentation topic based on your research. One method for getting “the
correct topic size” is by enlarging or contracting the time period covered. For
instance, you may originally have wanted to speak about the history of U.S.
immigration policy but found far too much information. Changing your topic to
U.S. immigration policy since the 9/11 attacks would help reduce your presen-
tation to a more manageable size. Another method of adjusting your topic is to
modify the geographic area covered. You might fi nd that a speech on Nike’s use
of child labor in Vietnam does not produce much information, but broadening
the topic to include the Nike’s operations throughout the entire world gives you
enough research material to effectively address the subject.

The Goal: Reliable and Credible Evidence

At this point it is tempting to simply provide a laundry list of places to look for
information: the Internet, the library, the daily newspaper, and so forth. We
think this is actually backwards. Before you start looking for evidence for your
speech, we think you need to know what to look for. More specifi cally, you need
to know what constitutes reliable and credible evidence.
Reference librarians at our university developed a useful tool, which they
nicknamed the CRAAP test, for assessing online information. The letters stand
2
for Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy, and Purpose. We feel that it is useful
for more than just Web sites. In fact, these are the hallmarks of credible evi-
dence, whatever the source.

Currency In today’s world, things change at such a rapid pace that often yes-
terday’s news is both stale and downright wrong. Whatever your topic, you want
the most current, up-to-date information possible. One advantage of published
sources is that the dates are usually apparent. With Web sites, you may not know
when the information was posted. (By clicking on the File menu option and then