ABSTRACT
Spending time honing in on a speaking topic that is important to us is vital because we will spend a significant amount of effort collecting facts and gathering ideas for our speech, followed by organizing the information and constructing our speech. We can collect information for our speech in a number of ways: develop it from our own knowledge and experience, access it from the web, gather it through tangible resources like books and magazines, and acquire it through interviews. If the subject we have chosen is from our own experience or knowledge, then this is the first place to start when gathering supporting material for our speech. Keep in mind that our experiences include not only our personal involvement with, or observation of, events as they occurred, but also those things we have experienced vicariously by reading or hearing about them. Brainstorming is an excellent technique for generating ideas on our subject.
