What to speak about? How to find a topic?  Does the topic have the appropriate scope? Being stuck, not knowing what to talk about? How to move from general purpose to specific purpose and a thesis statement? These are key questions speakers must answer as they prepare for a presentation.  First, determining general purpose: Is the goal to inform, to persuade or to entertain.   Next, the section discusses how to broaden the topic or narrow the topic down to meet speaking constraints. Finally, it suggests tools to help to come up with topic ideas for topics. Once a topic is selected, the speaker must determine their specific purpose and central idea. 

Learning Objectives

Understanding Research
Source Types
Academic
Nonacademic
Evaluating Sources
Incorporating Research
Plagiarism
Avoiding Plagiarism
Source Documentation Styles
How to Parenthetically Cite
Source Pages
How to Verbally Cite

This video covers concepts related to searching within academic research databases, using EBSCO's Academic Search Complete and ProQuest Central as examples. Concepts covered are: using the advanced search, limiters, Boolean operators, citing from a database, and more. Concepts related to information literacy and research skills are covered.

Google Slides presentation covering persuasive appeals, forms of reasoning, constructing arguments, and logical fallacies.

A brief tutorial on researching and using supporting materials in public speaking. Topics include types of supporting materials, where to find supporting materials, and evaluating sources.

Small Group Communication: Forming & Sustaining Teams is an interdisciplinary textbook focused on communication in groups and teams. This textbook aims to provide students with theories, concepts, and skills they can put into practice to form and sustain successful groups across a variety of contexts.

Speak Out, Call In: Public Speaking as Advocacy is a contemporary, interdisciplinary public speaking textbook that fuses rhetoric, critical/cultural studies, and performance to offer an up-to-date resource for students. With a focus on advocacy, this textbook invites students to consider public speaking as a political, purposeful form of information-sharing.

Speaking in public is consistently ranked in people's top fears, more so than flying, drowning, creepy crawly critters, and zombies.

The purpose of Speaking of Culture is to define culture and many other concepts associated with it. My hope is that the readings in this book will help you to better understand the breadth of the concept of culture and provide you with a vocabulary for discussing it more articulately.

Culture is one of those broad concepts that is used widely, although somewhat imprecisely, in everyday English. It also cuts across many academic disciplines, and this book draws on many of them. It touches, for instance, on anthropology, biology, history, mythology, political science, psychology, and sociology.

In some respects, public speaking isn’t all that different from a vacation; it should involve planning and purpose. Once you have selected a topic (or destination) for your speech, it’s important to take care with the details and make sure that your content is going to line up with the purpose of the speech. This video discusses the process of developing a general purpose statement, specific purpose statement, and central idea statement for a speech.

From audience analysis to giving a presentation, Stand up, Speak out: The Practice and Ethics of Public Speaking will guide students through the speech making process. The authors focus on the process of speech making because they have created this book to be a user-friendly guide to creating, researching, and presenting public speeches. While both classic and current academic research in public speaking guide this book, the authors believe that a new textbook in public speaking should first, and foremost, be a practical book that helps students prepare and deliver a variety of different types of speeches — and that is the primary goal of this book.With practicality in mind, the authors developed, Stand up, Speak out: The Practice and Ethics of Public Speaking, as a streamlined public speaking textbook. Many public speaking textbooks today contain over twenty different chapters, which is often impossible to cover in a ten-week quarter or a sixteen-week semester; this textbook is eighteen unique chapters. The fifteen chapters are divided into four clear units of information: introduction to public speaking, speech preparation, speech creation, and speech presentation.

Sometimes the hardest part of public speaking is figuring out what to talk about. This video discusses the criteria that make a solid speech topic and provides some basic tips on generating ideas for speech topics.

A brief tutorial on vocal delivery for public speaking. Topics include nonverbal communication, vocal variety, pronunciation, and articulation.

People’s viewing habits are changing as they migrate to mobile sources, social media, and kitten videos. Television News is still a dominant #1 source, and radio is still the safest way to stay informed in your car.

Hopefully, you already have some journalism background. This book does not teach the who, what, when, where, why, and how of reporting; its goal is to teach how to present the journalism you already know via electronic media, primarily television.

Scholars and communication professionals have adopted strategic communication as an umbrella term meant to include a variety of communication-related professions, such as public relations, brand communication, advertising, and more. Although the term is not new, scholars have only recently examined it as a cohesive paradigm.