13.5 Gathering Material

Once you’ve chosen a topic and started to develop a theme, the next step is to do some research, which will serve two purposes: 

• It will teach you more about the topic, and help you understand it in more depth; and
• It will provide evidence to support your claims. Why does evidence matter? See chapter 7 for answers.

For ideas about where to begin finding sources, you can consult Meggie Mapes’ public speaking textbook Speak Up, Call In, which has a chapter about researching.

In addition to thinking about where to look for information, you should also think about what kinds of evidence will be most useful. Mapes lists five types:

• Examples
• Narratives (personal or historical stories) – See Chapter 11 for more about stories
• Facts
• Statistics
• Testimony (either from experts or from non-experts who have experienced something relevant)

While looking over those sources, keep a critical eye out for what makes a particular source credible, using a tool such as Sarah Blakeslee’s CRAAP test, described in Chapter 7.