Have you ever gotten stuck when trying to find a topic for a
speech? Me too! One way to bypass that dilemma is to get advice from a magazine
article. The December 2019 issue of
Toastmaster magazine has
an article by
Craig Harrison titled
Everyone Has a Story. On January 5, 2020 I
blogged about
how
Toastmasters may also enjoy reading another magazine. That post mentioned the
January-February 2020 issue of
Speaker magazine (from the U. S.
National
Speakers Association) that has
another article by Ben Glenn titled
Tips for a
creative mindset. His seven are: Research, Write It Down, Be Curious, Incorporate
Pop Culture, Travel, Go for a Walk, Test Your Material.
Once you have a rough idea for a topic you can go on to research
it. Look around to find out how other well-known speakers previously had covered
it. Should you begin this process just by using a browser to web search with
Google (at their
Advanced Search page) or
Bing? Heck no!
About a decade ago I
saw an ad in Toastmaster for a monthly magazine called Vital Speeches of the
Day. It prints great speeches but an annual subscription currently costs $89. That
is more than I want to spend by myself, so I looked for other ways to get
access.
But you and I are not alone. Instead we are part of a large,
powerful group – Idaho Taxpayers. Collectively we already have paid for access
to that magazine (and lots more) via an state organization called
Libraries
Linking Idaho (LiLI). 85 years of articles from that magazine are available from
our public library web sites. I can sign into the
EBSCOhost databases with my
card number from the
Ada Community Library. How many other magazines (journals)
are on those databases? The big three are
Academic Search Premier (4,600),
Business
Search Premier (2,300) and
MasterFILE Premier (1,700). You likely have either
EBSCOhost
or a similar set of databases purchased by your state library system.
For example, suppose I wanted to do the electronic
equivalent of browsing through a stack of recent issues from
Vital Speeches of
the Day. I first could pick the database Academic Search Premier, and Select
Advanced Search. In Select a Field, pick SO Journal Name and enter Vital
Speeches of the Day. Then click Limit your results for Full Text. To the right
of Refine Results point to Relevance and change to instead use Date Newest. Then
I later can select some other fields to search by: Subject, Author, Title, etc.
One of the speeches I found in the February 2013 issue was Barack Obama’s
speech
at the funeral of his inspiration and colleague, Hawaii’s Senator Daniel K.
Inouye, titled
Freedom and Dignity Were Not Abstractions.
Back on February 24, 2015 I
blogged about How to do a better
job of speech research than the average Toastmaster (by using your friendly local
public and state university libraries). In that post I covered the following five
items:
1] Start with your public library.
2] You don’t have to reinvent the wheel.
3] Learn how to fish for information.
4] For even more depth, visit your state university library.
5] Where can I find out even more about research?
Now you can better use Google or Bing (and other tools). On July
8, 2010 I
blogged about Web search: 10 strategies for various occasions. They are:
Guess and Go, A Shot in the Dark, Bingo, Everything But the Kitchen Sink, Take
a Big Bite, A Little Help From Our Friends, Pearl Growing, Find Someone Who
Cares, Let the Fish Swim to You, and No Stone Unturned. One of those, Find
Someone Who Cares, is to interview an Expert. On August 24, 2009 I
blogged
about the
Joy of research: Answers may not come from where or who you might
expect.
How much research is enough? That depends. On January 24,
2020 I
blogged about A humorous reminder that you don’t have to be the world
expert on a topic in order to speak. If you are speaking to twenty people in a Toastmasters club
for six minutes, then you may not need much depth. But if you are doing an
18-minute TED talk you will want to go way deeper. On February 4, 2019 I
blogged about Reliable places to find information for your speeches. In that
post I discussed using some other tools you might find at a state university
library, and elsewhere (like databases for finding about opposing viewpoints on
controversial topics, and the planetary card catalog WorldCat).
Back on July 5, 2014 I
blogged about how
Reference librarians
are the heroes of research. In that post I discussed how one got me an
extremely obscure handbook via interlibrary loan. Some old books are digitized
at Google Books (many with that pesky Snippet View) or are in the Internet
Archive. On January 10, 2020 I
blogged about How old are brief (3 to 7 minute)
speech formats? There I mentioned finding two books from back in 1886 with
Five-Minute Sermons for Low Masses on All Sundays of the Year. The oldest
book
I found so far at the Internet Archive is by
John Bulwer -
Chirologia or the
Natural Language of the Hand from back in 1644. It is about gestures and is
discussed in
an article at the
Public Domain Review.
You need to maintain a skeptical attitude when doing
research. On October 9, 2017 I
blogged that
It must be true, since I read it in
a book. That post discussed reading a claim in a cookbook that iodine was added
to salt as an anticaking agent – which is nonsense. In local public libraries
you can find over a dozen books about homeopathy, although on January 6, 2016 I
blogged about how
According to Consumer Reports, homeopathy is an emperor with
no clothes.
This blog post also is a handout for the February 26, 2020
meeting of the Pioneer Toastmasters Club in Boise, Idaho with a theme of
Finding speech topics and doing research.
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