Page 219 - Between One and Many The Art and Science of Public Speaking

186 Part 3 Putting Theory Into Practice

the number of hits to 909. To make sure our results were from scholarly journals
and readily available to us, we further limited our search to peer-reviewed ar-
ticles that were available in full text (by checking the appropriate boxes on our
search screen). That left us with 163 sources. Academic Search also offered op-
tions to further narrow the search. We limited it to the United States, which left
us with 20 hits—a manageable list. And because all of the articles were available
in full text through the computer database, we were able to download them di-
rectly to our computer (or we could have e-mailed them to ourselves).
Unlike Open Internet sources, these are all from reputable journals (for ex-
ample, one article was from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists). A speaker who uti-
lizes articles from sources such as these will have no trouble defending the cred-
ibility of the sources cited in the speech.
Although databases such as Academic Search may initially seem to produce
far too many results to be usable, a careful narrowing of the parameters of our
search can lead to productive and easily accessible results. Although your li-
brary may not have this exact database, chances are it has a similar database
that can access reliable published information on a wide variety of topics.
Of course, not every library has a physical or electronic copy of every journal
listed in any given index or database. Thus you must compare the most promis-
ing articles from your search with your library’s holding of journals. Some li-
braries provide listings of the journals they have. The online catalog may also
list journals. You would look under the journal title, for example, to see if your
library had a particular journal. Even if your library does not have it, you may
be able to use interlibrary loan services to obtain a copy, if time permits. Also,
some libraries subscribe to special services that enable them to have copies of
journals not held in their collections faxed to the library for a nominal charge.

Consult Reference Sources
Frequently we need to fi nd a very specifi c fact—for example, how much plastic
was produced in the United States in a certain year. We could search a dozen ar-
ticles and never fi nd that number. But a good reference book, such as the Statisti-
cal Abstract of the United States, puts that kind of information at our fi ngertips. For
an online source of reliable government statistics, try the Web site http://www
.fedstats.gov/, which bills itself as “the gateway to statistics from over 100 U.S.
17
Federal agencies.” This site includes topics from A to Z, map statistics, links to
various federal agencies, and even the ability to access the online version of the
Statistical Abstract of the United States.
Perhaps we need a good quotation to begin or end our speech. Numerous
books of quotations are available. Your library probably has books such as
Bartlett’s Quotations on its shelves. However, an easier way to fi nd quotations is
to go to Bartleby.com’s Great Books Online at http://www.bartleby.com/, which
includes more than 87,000 quotations. You can combine your search to include
several sources at once, including the venerable Bartlett’s. For the fi rst edition of
this book, we were interested in a quotation frequently used by the late Robert
Kennedy that went something like, “Some men see things as they are and say,
why; I dream things that never were and say, why not.” We expended several
hours of library research tracking down the original source. For this edition we
used Bartleby.com, and in less than a minute we had found the original quo-
tation. It is actually, “You see things; and you say ‘Why?’ But I dream things