Sources of Supporting Materials Printed Material Through the

Sources of Supporting Materials • Printed Material. Through the careful use of the library, you can discover an almost overwhelming amount of materials relevant to your speech subject and purpose. Newspapers obviously are a useful source of information about events of current interest. Magazines and Periodicals, Professional and Trade Journals, Yearbooks and Encyclopedias, Documents and Reports, Biographies and books on special subjects: all these provide a storehouse of interesting information.

Interviews. • Much useful and authoritative information may be gathered merely by asking questions of the right persons. for example If you expect to talk about interplanetary navigation, a convenient source of information could be from a member of an Astronomy Department of Office. Brief interviews, properly arranged and scheduled, frequently yield invaluable factual data and authoritative interpretations and opinions.

Letters and Questionnaires • . If you cannot talk directly with an expert, you can sometimes obtain the information you need through correspondence. You might, for instance, write to a cereal company for data relative to the amount of sugars in its products. On other occasions, you may wish to find out what a group of people knows or thinks about a subject, in which case, you could send questionnaires to people randomly chosen for a public opinion sampling on your choice of a topic for a speech.

setting up an interview • In setting up an interview, it would be good to acquaint yourself with the informant’s background, current position, previous jobs, books or articles written, to help you frame pertinent and penetrating questions and evaluate the responses you receive. Develop an interview plan so you achieve the precise information you are seeking