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It’s About Them: 7.2 Using Research as Support

It’s About Them
7.2 Using Research as Support
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table of contents
  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Table Of Contents
  5. Preface
  6. What Is an Open Textbook?
  7. Chapter 1: Why Public Speaking Matters Today
    1. 1.1 Public Speaking in the Twenty-First Century
    2. 1.2 Why Is Public Speaking Important?
    3. 1.3 The Process of Public Speaking
  8. Chapter 2: Building Confidence
    1. 2.1 What is Communication Apprehension?
    2. 2.2 Classifying PSA
    3. 2.3 Learning Confidence
  9. Chapter 3: Audience Analysis
    1. 3.1 What Is Audience Analysis? Why Conduct It?
    2. 3.2 Why Conduct an Audience Analysis?
    3. 3.3 Three Types of Audience Analysis
    4. 3.4 Conducting Audience Analysis
    5. 3.5 Using Your Audience Analysis
  10. Chapter 4: The Importance of Listening
    1. 4.1 Importance of Listening
    2. 4.2 Listening vs. Hearing
    3. 4.3 Listening Styles
    4. 4.4 Why Listening Is Difficult
    5. 4.5 Stages of Listening
    6. 4.6 Listening Critically
  11. Chapter 5: Ethics
    1. 5.1 The Ethics Pyramid
    2. 5.2 Ethics in Public Speaking
    3. 5.3 Free Speech
    4. 5.4 Mass Communication and Ethics
  12. Chapter 6: Researching Your Speech
    1. 6.1 Beginning the Research Process
    2. 6.2 What Is Research?
    3. 6.3 Developing a Research Strategy
    4. 6.4 Citing Sources
  13. Chapter 7: Supporting Ideas and Building Arguments
    1. 7.1 Crafting Supporting Ideas
    2. 7.2 Using Research as Support
    3. 7.3 Exploring Types of Support
    4. 7.4 Using Support and Creating Arguments
  14. Chapter 8: Organizing and Outlining
    1. 8.1 Why is Organizing and Outlining Important
    2. 8.2 The Topic, General Purpose, Specific Purpose, and Thesis
    3. 8.3 Organizational Patterns of Arrangement for Informative Speeches
    4. 8.4 Outlining Your Speech
  15. Chapter 9: Delivery
    1. 9.1 The Importance of Delivery
    2. 9.2 Methods of Speech Delivery
    3. 9.3 Preparing for Your Delivery
    4. 9.4 Practicing Your Delivery
    5. 9.5 What to Do When Delivering Your Speech
  16. Chapter 10: Introductions and Conclusions
    1. 10.1 Introductions
    2. 10.2 Conclusions
  17. Chapter 11: Language
    1. 11.1 What Language Is and Does
    2. 11.2 Standards for Language in Public
    3. 11.3 Using Effective Language in Public Speaking
  18. Chapter 12: Presentation Aids
    1. 12.1 What Are Presentation Aids?
    2. 12.2 Functions of Presentation Aids
    3. 12.3 Types of Presentation Aids
    4. 12.4 Using Presentation Slides
    5. 12.5 Low-Tech Presentation Aids
  19. Chapter 13 Informative Speaking
    1. 13.1 What is an Informative Speech?
    2. 13.2 Types of Informative Speeches
    3. 13.3 Guidelines for Informative Speech Topic Selection and Preparation
    4. 13.4 Sample Informative Speeches and Speech Outlines
  20. Chapter 14: Persuasive Speaking
    1. 14.1 Why Persuade?
    2. 14.2 A Definition of Persuasion
    3. 14.3 Why is Persuasion Hard?
    4. 14.4 Traditional Views of Persuasion
    5. 14.5 Constructing a Persuasive Speech
    6. 14.6 Sample Persuasive Speech Outlines
  21. Chapter 15: Special Occasion Speaking
    1. 15.1 Understanding Special Occasion Speaking
    2. 15.2 Types of Special Occasion Speeches
    3. 15.3 Special Occasion Language
    4. 15.4 Special Occasion Delivery
    5. 15.5 Sample Special Occasion Speech Outline
  22. Chapter 16: Online Public Speaking
    1. 16.1 Online Public Speaking
  23. About the Contributors
  24. Adaptations
  25. Glossary
  26. Appendix A: Checklist for Accessibility

7.2 Using Research as Support

business meeting with people working

In public speaking, the word “support” refers to a range of strategies used to develop the central idea and specific purpose by providing corroborating evidence. Whether you are speaking to inform, persuade, or entertain, using support helps you create a more substantive and polished speech. We sometimes use the words “support” or “evidence” interchangeably because both are designed to help ground a speech’s specific purpose. However, “evidence” tends to be associated specifically with persuasive speeches, so we opt to use the more general term “support” for most of this chapter. In this section, we are going to explore why speakers use support.

Why We Use Support

Speakers use support to help provide a foundation for their message. You can think of support as the legs on a table. Without the legs, the table becomes a slab of wood or glass lying on the ground; as such, it cannot fully serve the purpose of a table. In the same way, without support, a speech is nothing more than fluff. Audience members may ignore the speech’s message, dismissing it as just so much hot air. In addition to being the foundation that a speech stands on, support also helps us clarify content, increase speaker credibility, and make the speech more vivid.

To Clarify Content

Speakers often choose a piece of support because a previous writer or speaker has phrased something in a way that evokes a clear mental picture of the point they want to make. For example, suppose you’re preparing a speech about hazing in college fraternities. You may read your school’s code of student conduct to find out how your campus defines hazing. You could use this definition to make sure your audience understands what hazing is and what types of behaviors your campus identifies as hazing.

To Add Credibility

Another important reason to use support is because it adds to your credibility as a speaker. The less an audience perceives you as an expert on a given topic, the more important it is to use a range of support from authoritative sources. By doing so, you let your audience know that you’ve done your homework on the topic.

Inadequate support or support from questionable sources diminishes your credibility as a speaker, as does distorting the intent of a source to try to force it to support a point. For example, the famous 1798 publication by Thomas Malthus, “An Essay on the Principle of Population,” has been used as support for various arguments far beyond what Malthus could have intended. Malthus’s thesis was that as the human population increases at a greater rate than food production, societies will go to war over scarce food resources (Malthus, 1798). Some modern writers have suggested that, according to the Malthusian line of thinking, almost anything that leads to a food shortage could lead to nuclear war. For example, better health care leads to longer life spans, which leads to an increased need for food, leading to food shortages, which using this flawed line of reasoning, would lead to nuclear war. Clearly, this argument makes some giant leaps of logic that would be hard for an audience to accept.

For this reason, it is important to evaluate your support to ensure that it will not detract from your credibility as a speaker. Use the CRAAP method (currency, relevance, authority, accuracy, and purpose) found in Chapter 8 of this book to evaluate the quality of your sources.

To Add Vividness

In addition to clarifying content and enhancing credibility, support helps make a speech more vivid. Vividness refers to a speaker’s ability to present information in a striking, exciting manner. The goal of vividness is to make your speech more memorable. For example, in a speech about the importance of wearing seat belts when in a motor vehicle, a student offered the following illustration about their efficacy in preventing serious injury or death: the impact from hitting a windshield at just twenty miles per hour without a seat belt would be equivalent to falling out of the window of their second-floor classroom and landing face-first on the pavement below. Because the students hearing the speech were in that second-floor classroom several times each week, they could easily visualize the speaker’s analogy. Support helps make your speech more interesting and memorable to audience members.

Annotate

Next chapter
7.3 Exploring Types of Support
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Presenting and Public Speaking
It’s About Them: Public Speaking in the 21st Century Copyright © 2022 by LOUIS: The Louisiana Library Network is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted
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