Kallia fiddled with her pen as she listened as Professor Mir explained the persuasive speech assignment. She was so lost in thought that she almost missed it when Professor Mir said, “Okay everyone, get in pairs and talk to the other person about your topic.”

Kallia turned in her seat to face Emily. They hadn’t interacted much in class, but she was usually pretty quick to answer questions when the professor called them out.

“So, you wanna work together?” Kallia asked.

“Sure!” came Emily’s quick reply.

Emily started talking about her intent to talk about puppy mills. Kallia thought it would be a good topic—it was an easy thing to ask people do to and there would be lots of pictures of cute puppies. As Emily explained her idea, Kallia listened intently, nodding where she thought was appropriate.

After talking through her idea, Emily asked, “Well, what about you? What are you going to give your speech on?”

“I don’t know,” Kallia said. “I hadn’t given it much thought.”

“What about your hair?”

“My hair?”

“Yeah, hasn’t there been some stuff in the news about a school that banned Black people from certain hairstyles?”

“Really? Dang, that’s messed up. Yeah, I could talk about the history of Black hairstyles.” Kallia said thoughtfully. Then, she grinned, “And, I could tell people to stop touching my hair all the time!”

“Sounds like a good ‘call to action’ to me!” Emily laughed. “Do it!”

---

Perhaps your professor has assigned the next speech assignment to you or will soon. Either way, you may feel a little bit nervous about coming up with a topic or with finding resources for it. The topic you choose, and the sources you use for evidence, need to attend to a variety of concerns. First is your topic one that is interesting, engaging, or provocative for your audience? Making sure you pick a topic that is relevant to your audience—but that is also interesting to you—can be challenging. However, by completing a good audience analysis (see Chapter Four), you can make sure you have a good idea about what might be appealing to your audience. Second, and just as important, you need to make sure that the topic you choose is complex enough that it warrants your time and effort to find research. Some topics may be interesting to enough for you to good-naturedly argue about with your friends but are not important enough to merit serious research. Choosing a topic that challenges to you find and learn new information is an excellent way to begin developing new ways of thinking about the world.

Although you may believe that choosing a topic or gathering information is something you would only do for a class assignment, the truth is that you need to develop these skills in almost every facet of your life. Whether you are giving a sales pitch, arguing for a better grade, negotiating a salary for a position, buying a new car, speaking at your local town hall meeting, or officiating a religious ceremony, you should think about what you are going to talk about and the evidence you will use to support it. Otherwise, you will find that you aren’t as successful in informing, persuading, or motivating others about the things that are important to you and, as a result, will be less successful in college, in your career, and in your civic life.

Choosing a topic for your speech (or essay, presentation, or research paper) can be a daunting task. On one hand, it seems like there are so many possibilities that it feels overwhelming. On the other hand, you may feel like no one does or will care about topics that are important, interesting, or fun to you. As Kallia found out in the opening story, just talking to her classmates was a great way to start thinking about a topic for her speech. Figuring out what is important to your audience is the hallmark of a great speech. But, sometimes just coming with an idea, any idea, can be difficult. Luckily, there are resources around you that you can use to help:

Read the Assignment

The most important starting point is to figure out what the assignments are asking you to do and making sure you meet their requirements. Are some topics encouraged while others are restricted? What are its time limits? What are its requirements for sources in terms of quantity and quality? Whether in the classroom or in a professional meeting, you need to make sure that whatever you want to talk about, sell, or pitch, that it is appropriate to the context and requirements. Otherwise, no matter how good your speech content is or how well you deliver it, your audience will not be informed, persuaded, or motivated about the topic.

Explore Library and Online Resources

There are some resources that are dedicated to helping students come up with strong topics. Here, we’ll talk about two prominent resources that you can access through your library or through an Internet search. The first is CQ Researcher, which is an organization of researchers, journalists, and fact-checkers that publishes on topics, such as “health, social trends, criminal justice, international affairs, education, the environment, technology and the economy” (para. 1). You can choose from dozens of topics and get highly vetted reports—helping you both find a topic and start your research about it. The second resource is Gale in Context-Opposing Viewpoints, which is operated by Cengage Publishing and is made available to libraries all over the world. This resources not only provides research about the topic, but it also shows the counterpoints to those arguments, no matter the side you take on an issue. This can be helpful when you are trying to figure out what those from other viewpoints might think about your stance and how you may best respond to them (or change your mind based the strength of their arguments!). Again, this is a great resource not only for coming up with a topic, but for starting your research about it as well. These resources can be found through your university or public library, so you will almost always have access to them.

Talk to a Librarian

Most universities have a librarian who is dedicated to helping students research topics as well as having a librarian who concentrates in research for your area of study (e.g., Biology, Communication, or Psychology). As such, they can be tremendous resources for choosing a topic that will be engaging and pointing you in the right direction for good sources to use for evidence. Librarians are trained professionals in finding, collecting, and vetting information—if they can’t find it, then it doesn’t exist!

Practice Brainstorming

Purposeful brainstorming is difficult for many people because they don’t see the value in writing down their thoughts. They are (after all) your thoughts, so what’s the point of going to the trouble of writing them out? However, research indicates that intentionally brainstorming your ideas can increase the quantity of ideas you come up with as well as the quality of the ideas (Baruah & Paulus, 2008). If you are doing a group speech or project, it is especially important to come up with ideas independently and then come together to develop the ideas if you are working in a group or committee. All too often, people get in groups and try to brainstorm, which can reduce idea quantity and quality because people are more concerned with their peers’ evaluation than with idea generation.

These approaches to idea generation can be excellent starting points for you in a variety of classes and contexts. Make sure to take these processes into your jobs and community organizations to ensure that they are being maximally effective. And, of course, use them in your class assignments (like the ones in this class!) to develop ideas that are engaging to your audience, interesting to you, and appropriate to the assignment’s purpose.

Now that you have a topic (or two!) that you have chosen, it is time to start thinking about gathering research on it. In the next chapter, we’ll discuss how to vet your sources and make sure they are reliable, accurate, and credible. But, for now, let’s just focus on some ways of finding information:

Search the Internet

When you are on the Internet, you can use search engines to quickly find information across a variety of websites and repositories. Some, such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo, are called webcrawlers, which search across the whole Internet and bring up results based on a variety of factors such as the search terms you used, how much traffic the website receives, and (in some cases) whether the website has paid for preferential treatment by the search engine company. You can either go to these websites (e.g., Google.com) and enter your search term or type it into your web browser’s address bar and it will use whatever your default search engine is. Although webcrawlers can bring up a great deal of information, there is a greater chance that it will not be vetted or reviewed in a way that ensures its accuracy. This is because the top results for your searches may be influenced by the outlet buying ad space or highly used keywords, which artificially places them above better sources in your search. Another way to search for information is to use academic databases, which are collections of scholarly writings on a particular subject. These databases are usually only accessible with a university, college, or public library subscription. These databases can be daunting for new users because searches often need to be more specific and limited in order to obtain the best results. However, you are much more likely to find reviewed, vetted, and credible information through these databases than through a traditional webcrawler search. Finally, there are hybrid search engines, such as Google Scholar, which utilizes webcrawler technology, but focuses more on academic literature. Google Scholar’s strength is in the wide net it casts to find scholarly writing, which typically brings up more results than any one database. However, Google Scholar doesn’t do a great job in differentiating among different outlets and, as a result, there sometimes a lot of results from pseudo-research sites, which look like research but are not, in actuality, reviewed and vetted in a substantial way. Therefore, it is important to be mindful when using search engines such as Google Scholar by itself.

Use Your Library

Although certainly a great deal of information is on the Internet, not all of it (or the best of it) will be online. A great deal of scholarly work, expert opinions, and opposing viewpoints can be found in textbooks, edited collections, video repositories of scholarly interviews, and theses/dissertations. You may be able to find any of these sources through searching your library’s website, but you may need to obtain them by actually going to the library and checking them out. In these instances, you may ask the reference librarian to help you find sources such as books if you are unfamiliar with how your library collects and catalogues them.

Select Keywords

When searching for content one of the most important things you need to get correct are your search terms. For example, if you search for “Common mistakes when using a search engine” in Google the vast majority of results you get back are how content producers can make sure their content (e.g., website, YouTube channels, or blogs) is able to be found quickly and easily. However, “common mistakes when searching for information on the internet” brings up more results about how users can better search for information rather than how creators can showcase their work. In other words, even though both phrases may be similar in our everyday use of them, they can bring up some pretty dramatically different results. If you are getting frustrated with the content your search terms are bringing up, try to make your request in as many different ways as you can (don’t be afraid of using a thesaurus to come up with similar words/phrases!). If you are still not finding what you need, many webcrawler search engines have “Additional Searches,” which shows how other users have made similar search requests. These can be great ways of expanding your search.

Limit Year of Publication

Sometimes it is important that you focus on a specific set of years. In some cases, you may want the most recent research on a topic. For example, if a situation is rapidly developing (e.g., the Russia’s invasion of Ukraine) or if a field is developing quickly (e.g., cutting edge research about a medical procedure), then it is vital that you get the most current information. Many search engines allow you set parameters of a search’s publication date by clicking on which years you want. You may also want to use this feature to see how information has changed or evolved over time. For example, setting the search terms on medical information about COVID-19 for only 2020 to 2021 will allow a person to see how medical science research developed over time as more testing was conducted.

Employ Boolean Operators

Boolean operators sound complicated but are very easy to use. They direct the search engine to proceed with its search in a specific way. For example, if you write in a search engine communication theory the search engine will search for communication, theory, and communication theory which may give me a lot of results, but those results may not all be useful for my research. However, if you search with the phrase Communication AND theory, then the search engine will know that you are only interested in content that contains both terms (excluding content that only has communication or theory by itself). Or, if you wrote a search as communication or media theory, it would bring up sites that connected to communication as well as media theory as two separate categories. If you wanted to find theories from communication or media scholars, you would use the phrase (communication OR media) AND theory. This phase will direct the search engine to look for instances of communication theory or media theory. Some search engines, such as EBSCO, have the Boolean phrases as drop-down menu options next to the search terms whereas other search engines (e.g., Google or Bing) will require you to write them into your search.

Read the Literature Review/Reference Lists

Once you have found an article or book that is pertinent to your research topic, you can look at the literature review and reference list to see all of the previously conducted research that informs the work you are currently reading. You can start your search by going back and reading this work to make sure you know the literature that is informing your current project and if you agree with the conclusions that the article or book you are reading came to based on their reading of the same literature. You can also look across multiple research articles or books to see which studies are used the most by the majority of scholars—those are usually foundational pieces, controversies in that field of study, or highly influential studies that have laid the groundwork for that area of investigation.

Use Analytics

When you access an article or when you search on Google Scholar, you are sometimes able to see the research that has cited the article or book you are currently reading. This data is an excellent place to start because it gives you a glimpse into how influential the research has been (often, the more it has been cited the more influential it has been) and how subsequent research has built upon, extended, or refuted the findings of your research article. Some research that cites the article or book doesn’t address the work in a substantial way, so not all of the work you find in this way will be useful. Additionally, more recent work may not have been cited yet or have a low citation count because other scholars haven’t had a chance to read and respond to the research yet. But, this is a still an excellent first step of identifying the scholarly conversation. And, if you have already looked at the article’s or book’s reference list and started reading that work, you now have an excellent viewpoint of all the research conducted prior to the article or book you are reading (through the reference list) and has subsequently used the article or book you are reading (through the analytics).

Using these tips will help you obtain the most, and most relevant, information for your topic. However, it will not necessarily ensure that you get the most reputable, verifiable, or credible information. We’ll talk more about how to vet your information in the next chapter. For now, though, practice these skills so you can start to obtain information that is pertinent to specific to your topic.

Have you ever played the telephone game? You sit in a circle and the first person whispers a word or phrase to the next, who then whispers it to the next, and so on until they reach the end of the circle. By the time it gets to the end, what the last person recalls as the word or phrase is usually quite different than the one that started the game. The same is with sources. The further you get away from the primary source–that is the one that originally conducted the study or made the original claim–the more likely you will get information that may be distorted, incomplete, or inaccurate to what was originally said.

This is NOT to say the original claim was true, factual, or correct; however, it is important that you know what was originally said so you can see if it agrees or disagrees with other sources on the subject. It’s okay to rely on secondary sources (e.g., literature reviews, summaries, Wikipedia, Encyclopedias, or textbooks), which are sources that report, analyze, synthesize, describe, or explain the content of the primary source but are not—themselves—the originating source of the information. These sources are a great way to get a broad understanding about the topic or to find out where to start researching, but you need to make sure you don’t over-rely on them, or you might inadvertently report inaccurate information.

There are a wide variety of sources that you can use to get information about your topic or to use as evidence. Although some forms of sources tend to reflect certain standards of knowledge production (e.g., journal articles usually have higher standards than say, a web blog), we want to stress that the type of source you use does not always correspond to its value or rigor. However, we want to make sure you don’t immediately pass over some forms of information because of the type of source.

Expert Testimony/Interviews

Sometimes, people who have extensive knowledge in an area—whether through long study or experience—may offer their insights on a radio or television show, podcast, YouTube channel, blog, or the opinion page of a newspaper. Expert testimonies or interviews can offer good insights, especially if the expert very clearly cites their sources (Check out Chapter Nine for how to verbally cite information). However, it’s important to remember that testimonies and interviews are the opinions and viewpoints of a particular person at a particular time—it has most likely not been vetted by an unbiased third party before it was said. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Kay Allison (Kate) Shemirani (a UK-based nurse) claimed that COVID was spread through 5G Internet networks and that vaccines were poison. Many of us may see nurses as medical experts—a fact that Shemirani exploited by constantly referring to herself as a nurse and wearing scrubs in her social media videos—but her views were wildly out of step with the medical research about the virus. So, be careful to not over-rely on expert testimony or interviews as your only or primary source of information. However, expert testimony/interviews can be useful because often they are easy and engaging ways to start learning about a new topic or ideas.

Dictionaries

There are different types of dictionaries, which can be useful for a variety of situations. The dictionary you may have used in the past is called a “generalized dictionary,” which usually lists all the lexemes or root words (e.g., swim is the root word of swims, swam, swimming) of a language in alphabetical order and describes the way or ways the word is used. This type of dictionary is appropriate when you want to know how a word is defined and used by everyday people and its origins. Common general dictionaries for US English include the American Heritage Dictionary, The Merriam-Webster Dictionary, and the New Oxford American Dictionary. Other dictionaries are called “specialize dictionaries,” which are used to describe theories, terms, concepts, or ideas that are specific to an area of study. This type of dictionary is more appropriate when you are defining terms that necessitate knowing proper terminology, jargon, or technical language. Common specialized dictionaries include Dorland’s Illustrated Medical Dictionary and Black’s Law Dictionary. When you have a choice between using a general or specialized dictionary, you should always choose the latter. Specialized dictionaries provide more detailed, comprehensive, and specific information, which makes your speech more informative and credible. Just think—you wouldn’t want someone to conduct a medical operation on you or defend you in court with knowledge from a generalized dictionary!

Encyclopedias

Much like dictionaries, encyclopedias are commonly used by students who are learning about a new topic or issue. However, encyclopedias (sometimes spelled, encyclopaedia) often provide more information than simply a definition of a word. Encyclopedias are collections of information, often giving broad summaries about terms or issues. Similar to dictionaries, there are general encyclopedias, which provide a short synopsis about major events, people, topics, or issues. For example, the World History Encyclopedia, Oxford World Encyclopedia, or the Encyclopedia Britannica are regarded as reputable general encyclopedias. There are also specialized encyclopedias, which are more comprehensive examination of information in a given area of study. For example, the Encyclopedia of Communication Theory is an amazing repository for the most important scholars, theories, and ideas in our discipline of study.

Social or Alternative Media

As you might imagine, social or alternative media is usually not a reputable source to rely on for information. At best, many of the claims you’ll encounter in this area are them fulfilling a secondary source function—they are merely reporting on what primary sources have originally found or argued. At worst, you can quickly find yourself listening to a lot of conspiracy theories, clickbait, misinformation, half-truths, and just plain stupidity. If the social or alternative media account is associated with a reputable organization, such as the American Psychological Association, then there is a better chance that it will be reliable. However, we recommend that if you find information on social or alternative media that you want to use, your best course of action is to find out the primary source (e.g., a research article) that first proposed the information.

Traditional or Legacy Media

Traditional and legacy media can be reputable when used and vetted properly. The first thing to understand is that everything that is published under traditional or legacy media is not considered “news.” That is, some outlets report news (e.g., the Associated Press), some provide analysis (e.g., The Atlantic), and others provide a mixture of the two (e.g., CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News). You need to be able to discern if the article is news, analysis, opinion, advertisement, or a combination thereof. The second thing to remember is that many media organizations must sell ad space to stay profitable (some, such as the BBC, PBS, NPR, ProPublica, or The Guardian rely on donations or taxes and are non-profit entities). Therefore, those news organizations identify and serve a particular demographic or market share in order to maximize their return on investment. For example, AllSides (2023), an organization that tracks media bias, showed the headlines from articles about the creation of a federal office to oversee and report on access to clean water and air—the Office of Environmental Justice. In reporting on the announcement, The Daily Wire (a far-Right news outlet) reported “Biden Signs Executive Order to Make Entire Government Focus On ‘Environmental Justice.’” Notice how The Daily Wire’s headline assumes its reader is aligned with their far-Right, anti-government beliefs by framing the issue as the “entire government” will focus on this one issue which is, of course, an absurd premise for a number of reasons (e.g., the President doesn’t control the entire government, the government will continue operating programs like the military or social security, and the new office has an extremely small budget and limited scope). This headline will most likely agitate like-minded people who will then be more motivated to click on other links on the Daily Wire’s website—increasing their revenue.

Non-Profit Organization Reports

Some non-profit organizations are excellent resources for gathering information about a topic. Some organizations provide information on a wide variety of topics, such as the Pew Research Center. Others focus on specific issues and publish information on a limited number of topics, such as RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network) or NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness). However, just because an organization claims to be non-profit, non-partisan, or charitable does not mean that they necessarily produce reliable information. Non-profit organizations that focus on research are often called think tanks. Some think tanks are highly regarded and have a history of finding and representing facts in a credible way, such as the Brookings Institution, which is one of the oldest think tanks in the United States. Unfortunately, to be a think tank an organization simply needs to be a non-profit, non-partisan organization—there are no criteria that their research must be reputable, factual, or vetted in a substantial way. For example, the Heartland Institute, Heritage Institute, Cato Institute, Americans for Tax Reform, and the Family Research Council have downplayed the harms of smoking cigarettes, hydraulic fracturing (i.e., fracking), climate change, and/or attacked LGBTQ rights and families—unsurprising positions given that many of their donors have ties of tobacco, oil, and gas industries or conservative religious groups.

Professional/Trade Magazines

These types of magazines are usually produced by organizations in a specific area of study. These sources are best used in two instances. First, they can provide excellent summaries of past research and are often written in fun, exciting, or simplified ways. This makes them less daunting than reading the technical literature on the issue and broadens their appeal. The second way to use this source is to find out cutting edge information on a topic. Often, scholarly journal publications can take months or even years of vetting and review before they are published, which means there is serious lag-time between new information being discovered and publications reporting those results. Professional/trade magazines bridge this gap by providing information on the topic with a much shorter publication timeline from submission to print. However, as you may imagine, getting content out quicker doesn’t always mean the information is better, so it’s a good idea to remember that magazine content can be partial, incomplete, or tentative. Typical professional/trade magazines include Psychology Today, Harvard Business Review, WIRED, The Economist, Bloomsburg Weekly, and Forbes.

Textbooks

Textbooks are often solid choices for information for a number of reasons. First, most scholarly textbooks go through an expert peer-review process before they get published. This process is especially true for textbooks that are published by a university publishing press (e.g., Oxford University Press), but can apply to textbooks from a variety of publishers (e.g., Cengage, Sage, or Waveland Press). When writing this book, for example, we contacted nearly a dozen experts in communication studies from across the nation to read and vet our work! Second, most scholarly textbooks are written by experts in that particular field of study. Some books are even collections of expert writings (called “edited collections” or “handbooks”), featuring experts from a wide range of insights in a field of study. However, we do want to issue a few cautions. First, when you read a textbook, you should differentiate between primary and secondary sources. Some textbooks are original, primary sources that develop new insights or knowledge. Others function more like encyclopedias; that is, they are secondary sources that are reporting or summarizing previously produced information (like this book!). Again, although there is nothing inherently wrong with a secondary source, it does mean that you are relying on the author’s summary of a concept or idea instead of finding the original, primary document. Second, although highly reputable publishing companies produce well-researched and rigorously vetted books, there are some publishing houses that do not have such high standards. Many will publish anything as long as they think it will make money (often the more sensationalist the better) or they will require the author pay them up front to produce the text. In either case, the publishing house puts profits above rigorous knowledge production, which can catch the unwary who may erroneously believe that because it is a textbook, it will necessarily have credible information.

Government Outlets

There are a number of government outlets that may have information that is pertinent to your search. For information in the United States, typical outlets include the U.S. Census Bureau, National Bureau of Labor Statistics, National Center for Education Statistics, and Justice Department. There are, of course, many more governmental outlets than this small list. Almost every major topic has a government body that oversees the collection of data on the subject. As with any other source, it is important to cross-reference any governmental organizational content with other available information to ensure you are getting credible information.

Scholarly Journal Publications

Ideally, academic journals are repositories of information created, reviewed, and vetted by experts in a particular field of study. Journals are published a little as once per year, to as many as 12 per year. Each journal publication is an issue, which contains a number of articles written by authors. All the issues published in a year are called a volume. Articles within each journal are written by experts, for experts, which is why they often rely heavily on technical language that you may be unfamiliar with at first. Well-conducted studies are reviewed by a panel of experts—often as many as five—whose identity is anonymized from the author (the author’s identity is also anonymized to the reviewers). This process, known as anonymous review, ensures that research isn’t accepted or rejected due to who a person is, only the merits of their work. Scholarly work proceeds over time, with no one study or research article ‘proving’ anything. Rather, it is in the cumulative knowledge on a particular subject that scholars tend to accept some premises as foundational. However, even foundations can change! For example, the change from the Ptolemaic system of astronomy (i.e., the Earth is at the center of the universe) to the Copernican system (i.e., the sun is at the center of the universe) was not ‘proved’ overnight, but required decades of testing and retesting by scholars until it was assumed as foundational. Although scholarly journal publications should uphold the highest standards of knowledge production and rigor, bad actors abound. Some journals do not review or vet articles well, other will publish anything in exchange of payment, and others are fronts for misinformation campaigns.

We cannot stress enough that no one source automatically guarantees that you will get valid, reliable, or credible information. For every source that promotes reliable content, there are many others that produce misinformation and disinformation. Our purpose for now is to introduce you to the range of sources that you could use, so you don’t close yourself off from sources that might be helpful or that you didn’t know about before now. As we get into the next chapter, we’ll talk more about how to develop a system for vetting the information you get from these sources. For now, though, start looking at all of these sources for information about your topic. See what others—rightly or wrongly—are saying about it. You may learn new reasons for your beliefs or change your positions on something when you encounter new information. That’s great! The purpose of a college education is to bring you into contact with content and ways of thinking about information that you may not have considered before. The hallmark of an educated person is their ability to engage with a lot of viewpoints and come to evidence-based conclusions.

Figuring out your topic and gathering information on it can be daunting, but it can be exciting as well. Your assignments in this class, and beyond, are opportunities for you to learn new things, encounter new ideas, and refine/change your beliefs. What most important is that you start to develop the skills to find information from a wide variety of sources—sources that represent a range of beliefs and modalities—to begin shaping your views. There is no one source that is objective or perfect; rather, it is only through working through a range of ideas and talking with others that you will become a knowledgeable, well-informed person.