Finding Evidence to Back Up Your Claims

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There are four basic forms of evidence:

Narratives are examples that draw upon yours or others' experiences. DeVito recommends that your narratives be short and few in numbers. He further recommends that you make explicit the connection between your story and the point you're making in your talk. Audiences tend to appreciate stories and anecdotes.

Statistics are collections of data. Grice and Skinner recommend that you round off your numbers, stress the impact of large numbers, and use presentational aids to represent or to clarify relationships among statistics.

Expert testimony references information from organizations or authorities. Zarefsky recommends that you carefuly assess your source's competence and credibility to convince your audience that your source is knowledgeable and trustworthy.

Objects and presentation aids include video and audio support to illustrate points. For some, "seeing is believing." Demonstrations of how to do something can add great impact to a talk.

U.S. government resources include FedWorld, located at http://www.fedworld.gov/ sponsored by the U.S. Department of Commerce. Categories include info on Find a Federal Job, Top Government Websites, Government Research and Development Publications, Key Government Science and Technology Websites, Supreme Court Decisions, and Internal Revenue Service. Also try Search FirstGov, which claims links to 30 million government web pages.

FedStats at http://www.fedstats.gov/ offers statistics from over 100 federal agencies. Categories include MapSates, Statistics by Geography, Statistical Reference Shelf, Press Releases, even a Kids' Page. Or use A-Z function to search by state or by agency name.

The White House Economic Statistics Briefing Room at http://www.whitehouse.gov/fsbr/esbr.html offers the latest available federal economic indicators. It provides links to information produced by a number of federal agencies. Topics include employment, income, international, money, output, prices, production, and transportation indicators.

The State and Local Government on the Net Directory at http://www.statelocalgov.net/index.cfm provides convenient one-stop access to the websites of thousands of state, county, city, and local government websites. Search by state or by topic. Also offered are links to sites for multi-state agencies, national organizations, and federal resources.

At Library of Congress you can go to the national library (your college library will have a number of useful resources as well -- check it out!). At http://www.loc.gov/homepage/lchp.html/ search categories such as Library Catalogs, American Memory, Exhibitions, Global Gateway, and Thomas ("in the spirit of Thomas Jefferson, legislative information from the Library of Congress"). Also has multiple sites on music, poetry, film, and art, including the American Folklife Center.

Consult with a think tank. The University of Michigan offers a list of many of these political groups at http://www.lib.umich.edu/govdocs/psthink.html This site for The Political Science Resources Think Tanks allows you to search for think tanks under the categories such as conservative, liberal, international relations, public policy institutes, public policy organizations, world directory, and others. Or use the alpha search to find individual think tanks by name.

Learn how to cite electronic sources, http://www.nvcc.edu/library/BOW/eleccite.htm. This site from NVCC (Northern Virginia Community College) lists about 14 links that give detailed instructions on citing sources. Incidentally, at the bottom, the "Best of the Web" button leads to an additional collection of resource links on a variety of topics.

Consult with the Pew Research Center, http://people-press.org/ to learn more about surveys, global attitudes, survey reports, and expert commentary.

Need a quote for your speech? Get it online from this classic source: Bartlett's Familiar Quotations at http://www.bartleby.com/bartlett/. Use indexes by author, subject, or title. Search by reference, verse, fiction, or nonfiction. Drop-down menu also allows search of about 40 other reference works besides Bartlett's.

Click here to evaluate sources of information on the web.

Click here to learn more about other types of evidence.

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