During the last half of the semester you will be required to present three speeches. The first speech will be informative (that is, the goal of the speech is to present interesting information well) on a specific topic about course material. The second speech is also informative and should involve a thesis that illustrates (but does not resolve) controversy within your term research topic area. The third speech will be persuasive (that is, the goal of the speech is to change minds of audience members or get them to take action). Later you will receive detailed descriptions of the speeches.

No later than Monday, September 17, you should select a general subject which will be suitable for the second and third speeches. In other words, you will need a subject which is broad enough that you can give an informative speech on some part of it AND is significant (controversial, complex, problematic) enough to merit trying to persuade us about something involving your subject.   [  List of Some Possible Research Topics  ]

For example, you might pick the topic AIDS. If so, your second informative ("issues") speech might use the thesis, "Activists argue that industrial nations should offer free or low cost medicines to African nations but others disagree." Your persuasive speech might try to get us to contribute money to the AIDS Foundation for Africans.

You should begin now (well before your speeches are due) to research your topic. Start building a bibliography during the next week. Since you have plenty of time to get materials, you can use interlibrary loan to order items the Monmouth Library does not have. Be sure to take advantage of the reference staff of the library. While the Hewes Library On-line Catalog is good starting point, I think you may find better material in periodical and news indexes or in government documents. Especially useful will be the Web based indexes found on the library home page ("Academic Search Premier (EBSCOhost)," "First Search (SILC)," "Lexis-Nexis" and "ERIC"). You should also check out the research links for CATA 101 Topics - Web Links (click here) or the Policy links on my 101 homepage (click here).  If you plan to use the internet for research, check out my guides for how to do internet research (especially, "Barebones")  [ click here ]  This page also contains other valuable resources for speakers, including style guides, guides to documenting sources and quick facts. 

The subjects of abortion, alcohol abuse, and drugs-in-sports are off-limits. Any other subject is possible -- but I must approve all subjects (first come, first serve).

 References Requirements

1. You must have at least five sources for each speech.  At least FOUR of the sources must be materials available in print (even though you may have accessed them on-line).  ONE of the sources must be your overview source and it must be identified as such in the "Works Cited" section of your speech outline.  You may have and are encouraged to include more than five sources.
2. References to the source material should always be cited using M.L.A. format unless I have given you permission to use a different format.
3. You must submit a preliminary ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY (in MLA format) with at least SIX, available-in-print sources and as many other sources as you care to include by Monday, February 20.  Be sure to identify the overview source.  For each of the six (or more) items in your bibliography, be sure to include a one to three sentence annotation summarizing the content of the source item in your own words.
     Smart researchers examine the references cited in the better articles they find (esp. from overview sources) in order to see if any of those references may be useful for their projects.  Useful index terms for your searches can also be discovered this way.
4. You may (and likely will) repeat references used in earlier speeches in the "Works Cited" section of the later speech outlines.