During the remainder of the semester you will be required to present three speeches.

• The first speech will be informative (For informative speeches, the goal of the speech is to present interesting information well) providing background information on what is currently important for us to understand about your topic.

• The second speech is also informative and should involve a thesis that illustrates (but does not resolve) a controversy within your term research topic area, a speech that fairly presents two sides of an issue.

• 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 Friday, September 19, you should select a general subject which will be suitable for all three 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 a topic that is significant (controversial, complex, problematic) enough to merit trying to persuade your fellow citizens about something involving your subject.   [  List of Some Possible Research Topics  ]

For example, you might pick the topic AIDS. If so, your first speech ("status quo") might describe what we know about why and how the virus has become so deadly in Africa.  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 Africa.

You should begin now (well before your speeches are due) to research your topic. Start building a bibliography during the next week or two. 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 through the library home page ("Academic Search Premier (EBSCOhost," "Lexis-Nexis-Academic,"  CQ (Congressional Quarterly) Researcher).

You may wish to pursue some variation of the topic you spoke about in the My Community" presentation, although that is not required.  The subjects of abortion and drug abuse-in-sports are off-limits.  Any other civically important subject is possible, only one student per topic -- and I must approve all subjects (first come, first served).

 References Requirements

1. You must have at least five sources for each speech.  At least FOUR of the sources must be materials available through library data bases or 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 or in a data-base sources and as many other sources as you care to include by Wednesday, September 28.  Be sure to identify the overview source.  CQ Researcher is one way to find an overview source.  (Ask me for other ideas.)  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.